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Biography

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Alexis Falconieri, known in Italian as Alessio Falconieri, was a Florentine nobleman of the thirteenth century and one of the Seven Holy Founders of the Order of Servants of Mary, the mendicant congregation commonly called the Servites. He was born in Florence, according to long-standing Servite tradition in or about 1200, into the Falconieri family, a lineage of standing in the city. In the early 1230s he and six companions of similar background belonged to a Marian lay confraternity in Florence. The traditional founding narrative of the order holds that on the feast of the Assumption in 1233 the seven received a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who called them to leave secular life, live in common, and dedicate themselves to her service. They first withdrew to a house beyond the city walls and afterwards settled on Monte Senario, a height north of Florence that became the motherhouse of the new community. There they adopted a black habit in memory of the Virgin's sorrows and took the name Servants of Mary. Episcopal approval followed in the 1240s, and the group came to live under the Rule of Saint Augustine.

Unlike several of his companions who received priestly ordination, Falconieri remained a lay brother for the whole of his religious life. Servite tradition presents this as a chosen humility: although a nobleman and a founder, he declined holy orders and spent many decades in the ordinary work of the house, including the humble task of begging alms for the brethren. He is remembered for austerity, silence, and a particular devotion to the Sorrows of Mary. He continued in this hidden manner of life long after the other founders had died, and later writers of the order regarded him as the last surviving link with the original community on Monte Senario.

Falconieri was the uncle of Saint Juliana Falconieri, who was born in Florence in the later thirteenth century and became the foundress of the Servite Third Order for women, known as the Mantellate. Tradition records that he received his niece into the third order and guided her early formation. He died at the monastery of Monte Senario on 17 February 1310. Later hagiography asserted that he was about one hundred and ten years old; that extreme age, though often repeated in Servite sources, cannot be confirmed by independent contemporary evidence and may belong to legend rather than to documented fact.

The Seven Holy Founders were beatified when Pope Clement XI approved their cult for the Servite Order in 1717, and they were canonized together by Pope Leo XIII on 15 January 1888. Their collective feast, at first kept on the anniversary of the canonization, was afterwards assigned to 17 February, the day of Falconieri's death, which thus serves as the liturgical commemoration both of Alexis himself and of all seven founders. Veneration of the group is especially associated with the Servite family and with the Basilica of the Santissima Annunziata in Florence, the order's principal church in the city of their origin.

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