Antonio Patrizi

Antonio Patrizi was an Italian Catholic priest and professed member of the Order of Saint Augustine who lived in Tuscany in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. He was born in Siena around 1280 into the noble Patrizi family; later tradition names his parents as Francesco and Ginevra Patrizi. From youth he was drawn to a withdrawn, penitential life. He entered the Augustinians at the hermitage of Lecceto, a woodland community near Siena noted in that period for strict observance and an eremitical character within the order. There he received formation and was ordained a priest.

He later lived at the small Augustinian house in Monticiano, in the Sienese countryside south of his native city. Contemporary documentation is scarce, and much of what is repeated about his inner life comes from later local tradition rather than from records written in his own lifetime. That tradition consistently presents him as a priest of marked humility, austerity, and charity, devoted to prayer, penance, and the service of his brethren and of people in the district. He is often called Antonio Patrizi da Monticiano in Italian sources because of this association with the town where he spent his last years.

According to the received account, in 1311 he gave up his own cell or bed to a sick companion or traveler and took a poorer resting place himself. He then fell ill and died on 23 April 1311. After his death a local cult formed around his tomb. Reports of favors attributed to his intercession circulated in the region, and the townspeople and the Augustinian community kept his memory. His remains have long been associated with the church of Sant'Agostino in Monticiano.

The cult remained essentially local for centuries. On 1 December 1804 Pope Pius VII confirmed the longstanding cultus, which in the practice of the time conferred the title of Blessed. He is commemorated on 28 April and is regarded as patron of Monticiano. Because he belongs to a poorly documented medieval eremitical milieu, precise chronology of his early years and many personal details cannot be independently verified; the outline that survives is that of a Sienese noble who became an Augustinian priest-hermit and died in the odor of local sanctity at Monticiano in the early fourteenth century.