Maggiorino Borgatello was born in 1857 in Varengo, Piedmont. He joined Don Bosco's oratory at 16 and was ordained in 1880. In 1888 Fagnano sent him to Punta Arenas, to the chapel that became the town's parish in 1901. He was its parish priest until 1912 and kept the parish books with great care.
On 18 September 1893 he opened a museum of ethnography and natural history in the old Colegio San José. He gathered objects from the peoples of Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia, archaeological finds, fossils, birds and local animals, including a Fuegian dog, a breed long extinct. Today it is the Museo Salesiano Maggiorino Borgatello on Avenida Bulnes.
According to the Salesian archive, he ran the Dawson Island mission until it closed in 1911 and studied the Selk'nam, Yagán and Kawésqar languages. In his reports he wrote that gold seekers in Tierra del Fuego were killing or enslaving Indigenous people. But in "Fiorellini silvestri" (1920) he told the deaths of dozens of Indigenous people, mostly children, as holy and exemplary; a 2025 study by Harambour and Orellana reads that book as evidence that the Salesians congratulated themselves on those deaths.
He went back to Italy and spent his last years at the basilica of Mary Help of Christians in Turin. He died in 1929.
