On the 27th of April, 1652, twenty-four years after an office in honour of St. Rita had been granted, a fire broke out in the house of Giovanni Polidori in Narni, and soon spread to an alarming degree. His wife Chiara, seeing that human aid was of no avail in overcoming the increasing flames, and recollecting that she had a little piece of the saint's veil, hurriedly sent her daughter to the roof of a house that had not yet taken fire to cast from there the piece of veil into the flames. The daughter did as she was told, and for fear the relic, which was wrapped in a piece of paper, should not carry so far owing to its lightness, she tied it with a thread to a piece of mortar. As soon as she had done so, she threw it, and the fire immediately ceased. Then Chiara, her family, and the others who were living in the house, went directly to St. Augustine's Church to offer their thanks to God and His saint. They found in the church the woman who had given the piece of veil to Chiara, and who was of even greater faith than her. Chiara considered that the relic was burned, but the woman maintained that it must have escaped the fire, for the instrument of the miracle ought not to have become the food of the conquered flames, and told them to go and look for it amidst the ashes. They went, and Chiara soon had reason to wonder at a second marvel, for she found the relic just as it had been when it was thrown into the flames, and neither the paper around it nor the string was in the least burned. They then returned to the church to renew their thanksgiving for the wonderful works done in their favour. The report of the occurrence was soon spread abroad, and a public account of it was printed on the 25th of the following May. It was also a pious custom of the nuns to distribute to the people the dust, the scrapings from the walls, and such things, of the saint's cell, and of the first coffin in which her sacred body had been placed and in which it had lain until 1745, and many marvellous results were obtained also from the employment of these things. Amongst other wonders Father Rivarola relates this one: A servant of Cardinal Fachinetti, Bishop of Spoleto, had a daughter who was blind of one eye, and whose other eye was so diseased that no hope could be entertained of curing it. She recovered the sight of both eyes by the sole use of that dust, which her mother cast into her eyes, an act which would naturally have further injured her eyes if the dust had not been made salutary by the Omnipotent, who, as we read in the Gospel,[2] gave sight to the blind by using clay. A certain Francesco Armilli obtained a similar grace by the same means. Both of these afterwards went to Cascia to give public testimony of the facts, and to return heartfelt fervent thanks to St. Rita.