Agostina Camozzi

Agostina Camozzi, later known as Christina of Spoleto, was born in 1435 in the region of Lake Como, then in the Duchy of Milan in northern Italy. Her father, Giovanni Camozzi, was a physician. Almost nothing that can be checked against contemporary records survives from her childhood, and the outline of her youth is known from later Augustinian and Spoletan tradition. That tradition describes her teenage years as restless and morally disordered. She is said to have entered into an illicit union and to have borne a son, who died while still an infant. She then left home and lived with a soldier; he too died, reportedly by violence. These bereavements are presented in the vitae as the immediate cause of her conversion.

Following this crisis, Camozzi turned to a life of penance. She sought admission to the Third Order of Saint Augustine and took the name Christina, the name under which she would be venerated. As an Augustinian tertiary in the mid-fifteenth century she would have been bound to a rule of prayer, fasting, and works of charity while remaining a laywoman rather than a cloistered nun. She left Lombardy for Umbria. Accounts associate her with Perugia and Foligno before she established herself in Spoleto, a city of the Papal States. In Spoleto she became a familiar figure of local devotion, known for austerity and for a reputation of holiness that attached to her already in life.

She died in Spoleto on 13 February 1458, at about twenty-three years of age if the conventional birth year is accepted. The faithful of the city honored her tomb, and she was popularly called Christina of Spoleto. Her memory was kept especially by the Augustinians. The cult remained regional for a long time. On 6 November 1834 Pope Gregory XVI confirmed the ancient cultus, an act that in the procedure then in use amounted to beatification. She has never been canonized and is therefore styled Blessed. The Catholic Church keeps her feast on 13 February, the anniversary of her death.

Because Camozzi was a young tertiary of modest origin, the documentary base for her biography is thin. Dates, family details, and the episodes of her early life rest on the hagiographical tradition that accompanied her cult rather than on a rich archive. Modern notices therefore repeat a relatively stable outline—Lombard birth, a disordered youth, conversion, Augustinian tertiary life in Umbria, and death at Spoleto in 1458—while remaining cautious about anecdotal elaborations that cannot be independently confirmed.