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Biography

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Anna Maria Taigi was born Anna Maria Giannetti in Siena in 1769, in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, the daughter of the pharmacist Luigi Giannetti and Maria Masi. After her father's business failed, the family fell into poverty and moved to Rome while she was still a child. There she received little formal schooling and worked as a domestic servant. Contemporary accounts describe her in youth as attractive and fond of dress and ordinary social diversions. In 1790 she married Domenico Taigi, a butler in the service of the princely Chigi family. Domenico was an honest and hardworking man of modest origin, but often impatient and harsh in speech. The couple had seven children, several of whom died in childhood. Anna Maria raised the surviving children in rented rooms, combining housework, needlework, and the practical care of a working-class Roman household with a growing life of prayer.

After marriage she underwent a lasting conversion from a somewhat worldly manner of life to intense piety. She became a tertiary of the Order of the Most Holy Trinity, remaining in the married state while wearing the Trinitarian scapular. She attended daily Mass, practised hidden mortifications, and gave time she could spare to the poor and the sick, without abandoning her duties to husband and children. Witnesses later testified that her home was orderly and that she did not neglect the family for the sake of extraordinary devotion. Domenico did not share her interior life, yet he came to respect her and, after her death, gave evidence in the canonical process.

From about 1790 until her death she was reported to experience a distinctive mystical phenomenon: a luminous globe or sun, perceived interiorly, in which she was said to behold distant events, the moral state of those who consulted her, and coming public trials. This "mystic sun," described at length in the acts assembled for her cause, lasted some forty-seven years. Cardinals, curial prelates, and ordinary Romans sought her counsel during the French occupation of Rome, the captivity of Pius VII, and the Restoration. She was credited with prophecy, discernment of souls, and practical advice, while continuing to live in poverty, to nurse her own family, and to give alms from small means. Among those closely associated with her spiritual direction was Monsignor Raffaele Natali.

In her last years she endured a long and painful illness. She died in Rome in June 1837. A popular reputation for holiness persisted among the Roman people and the Trinitarians. After the usual inquiries, Pope Benedict XV beatified her in 1920. She has not been canonized. Her remains, reported incorrupt at exhumation, are venerated in the Basilica of San Crisogono in Trastevere. Devotion to her has presented her as a model of holiness in ordinary married and family life, and she is invoked especially for housewives, mothers, and families.

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