In late 1852, in the anti-clerical industrial city of Turin in northern Italy, an Italian Catholic priest walking home alone at night was accosted by two armed men. A large grey shaggy dog appeared silently behind him from the dark. It drove the assailants off without violence. It walked him home to the Oratory. It vanished. Over the next thirty years, the same dog returned dozens of times. Always when the priest was attacked. Always silent. Never owned.

His name was Don Giovanni Bosco. He was thirty-seven. He was the founder of an Italian Catholic oratory for working-class youth in the Valdocco district of Turin. He was an increasingly resented target of the anti-Catholic secret societies of northern Italy. He was assaulted in the street, shot at on at least four occasions, and accosted by intruders inside his own residence. The dog appeared every time.

The dog was large, shaggy, wolf-like, and grey. Don Bosco called him Il Grigio. He had no collar, no owner, and no obvious origin. He would not eat. He would not sleep inside the Oratory. He would not respond to commands. He appeared silently from behind Bosco in the dark, drove off the attackers without violence, and walked Bosco home. He would vanish at the Oratory gate. He would reappear weeks, months, or years later, sometimes hundreds of miles from the previous appearance, identifiably the same dog. He was seen and described in identical detail by Don Bosco's mother Margherita Occhiena, by his secretary Don Berto, by his successor Don Rua, by his collaborator Father Alasonatti, and by dozens of named Salesian seminarians over thirty years.

The dog last appeared in approximately 1883. Don Bosco died in January 1888, aged seventy-two. The dog was never seen again. The case is documented in Don Bosco's own Memorie dell'Oratorio di San Francesco di Sales, written between 1873 and 1875, and in the nineteen-volume Memorie Biografiche di Don Giovanni Bosco compiled by Father Lemoyne and his successors between 1898 and 1948. The original manuscripts are preserved at the Salesian Central Archive in Rome.

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