section_path: Early life
section_name: Early life
paragraph_text: Early life
  
  Pope Francis was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio on 17 December 1936 in Flores, a neighbourhood of Buenos Aires. He was the eldest of the five children of Mario José Bergoglio and Regina María Sívori. Mario Bergoglio was an Italian immigrant and an accountant from Piedmont. Regina Sívori was a housewife born in Buenos Aires to a family of northern Italian origin. Mario Bergoglio's family left Italy in 1929 to escape the fascist rule of Benito Mussolini.: 5 According to María Elena Bergoglio, the Pope's only living sibling, the family did not emigrate for economic reasons. His other siblings were Oscar Adrián, Marta Regina, and Alberto Horacio. His niece, Cristina Bergoglio, is a painter based in Madrid, Spain.
  
  In the sixth grade, Bergoglio attended Wilfrid Barón de los Santos Ángeles, a school of the Salesians of Don Bosco in Ramos Mejía, Buenos Aires Province. He then attended the technical secondary school Escuela Técnica Industrial Nº 27 Hipólito Yrigoyen and graduated with a chemical technician's diploma. In that capacity, he spent several years working in the food section of Hickethier-Bachmann Laboratory where he worked under Esther Ballestrino. Earlier, he had been a bouncer and a janitor.
  
  When he was 21 years old, after life-threatening pneumonia and three cysts, Bergoglio had part of a lung excised.