"Beata Anonima," a chronicler recounts, "being already a Cistercian
nun in the convent of S. Cerbone of Lucca at the time of the siege of
that city by the Florentines, when the said nuns, for valid reasons,
were transferred to the convent of Sta. Christina inside the city. Now
this most fervent servant of God took this opportune time and fled by
stealth, disguised as a man, and went, or rather flew, to Assisi;
there, fired with an ardent desire to fight under the seraphic
standard, she breathlessly climbed the steep slopes of Mount Subasio,
and having found the horrible cavern of Santa Maria delle Carceri
fervently entreated those good Fathers to admit her amongst them and
to bestow on her their sacred habit, for which her longing was
extreme. At length, having overcome all resistance, believing her to
be a man as appeared from her dress, and not a woman which in reality
she was, they admitted her to the convent and gave her the habit of
religion." She edified all by the holiness of her life and the rigid
penances she performed, but her health soon suffered and only upon her
death-bed, surrounded by the friars chanting the psalms for the dying,
the Blessed Anonima confessed to the fraud she had practised in order
to dwell in the hermitage rendered so dear because of the memory of
the Poverello d'Assisi.
RIVO-TORTO[53]
A straight and stony road, the old Roman one, now overgrown in many
parts with grass and trails of ivy and bordered by mulberry and oak
trees, leads out of the Porta Mojano to two little chapels in the
plain. Set back from the main road in the midst of the fields few
people find them, and the peasants know nothing of their story and can
only tell of a miraculous well in which a youthful saint met his
death. When his body was brought to the surface a lily had grown from
his mouth and upon its petals was written in letters of gold the one
word, _Veritas_, for he had died in the cause of truth. Since then, as
the peasants recount with pride, many come from afar to drink of the
waters of this well for it cures every ill. It is over-grown with
ferns and close by stands an ancient sarcophagus where the children
sit to eat their midday meal. A piece of old worn sculpture still
ornaments the chapel of the young martyr, and the feeling of the place
is very charming, but the pilgrim who comes to Assisi to visit St.
Francis, has a different picture to recall with another kind of beauty
belonging to it than that of holy wells and flowering banks and
meadows.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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