Atto of Pistoia

Atto of Pistoia, called Attone in Italian sources, was a Vallumbrosan monk, abbot, and bishop whose career belongs to the reforming church of eleventh- and twelfth-century Tuscany. Later tradition records that he was born at Badajoz in the Iberian Peninsula toward the end of the eleventh century and that he travelled to Italy to take the monastic habit at Vallombrosa, the isolated house in the Pratomagno mountains founded by Saint John Gualbert. The Vallombrosans observed the Benedictine Rule with marked severity and had, from Gualbert's time, taken a public stand against simony and against clerical marriage, sometimes at considerable personal risk. Atto rose in this milieu and became abbot of Vallombrosa; some catalogues describe him as the seventh abbot-general of the congregation. The precise years of his abbacy are not uniformly reported in the sources.

In the 1130s Atto was named bishop of Pistoia. He governed a diocese whose cathedral, dedicated to Saint Zeno, stood at the centre of a growing Tuscan commune. As bishop he is portrayed as a disciplinarian in the Vallumbrosan mould, concerned to restore clerical standards. His most lasting public act was to secure a relic of the Apostle James the Greater from the shrine of Santiago de Compostela. In the middle of the 1140s he dispatched a mission to Galicia; a fragment of the apostle's body was granted and brought to Pistoia, where it was enshrined in the cathedral. The relic made Saint James (San Jacopo) the city's principal patron and turned Pistoia into a recognised centre of Jacobean devotion in central Italy. Atto wrote an account of the translation. He is also the author, or the attributed author, of a Latin life of Saint John Gualbert, which belongs to the medieval hagiographical dossier of the Vallumbrosan founder.

Traditional martyrologies give the date of his death as 22 May. The year is commonly printed as 1153 in modern works of reference, although some older authorities, including the Catholic Encyclopedia, give 1155. He died in Pistoia and was buried in the cathedral of San Zeno. A local cult formed around him, and his feast has been kept on 22 May. He was not canonized by a formal papal process of the later medieval type; veneration remained diocesan and regional. The documentary basis for his biography is modest, and several chronological details remain uncertain. What the sources consistently attest is that a Vallumbrosan named Atto, of reported Spanish origin, occupied the see of Pistoia in the second quarter of the twelfth century, linked that church to Compostela through the relic of Saint James, and was honoured after death as a saintly bishop.