Conon of Naso

Conon of Naso, known in Italian as San Cono di Naso, was a Basilian monk and abbot of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, venerated as a saint in the Roman Catholic Church. Traditional accounts place his birth in 1139 in Naso, a town in the Nebrodi mountains of northeastern Sicily, then belonging to the Norman Kingdom of Sicily. Later Sicilian sources describe him as the son of a prosperous or noble family and name his parents Nino and Alica. The island at that time still preserved a strong Greek-rite monastic culture alongside the Latin Church introduced by the Normans. After the death of his parents, the vitae state that Conon distributed his inheritance to the poor and entered the monastery of Saint Michael (San Michele) at or near Naso, living according to the Rule of Saint Basil the Great.

Hagiographical tradition further relates that he left communal life for a period of eremitical solitude and that he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the holy places. On his return he is said to have been elected abbot of the Basilian monastery of Saint Michael. The same tradition credits him with severe asceticism, care for the needy, and various miracles, including knowledge of events occurring far away. The most frequently repeated legend is that, while remaining in Sicily, he perceived the murder of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, in December 1170. That story belongs to later cultic narrative and is not supported by contemporary English or Sicilian chronicles. Independent archival evidence for Conon's abbacy and for the history of his monastery is extremely scarce.

According to the received chronology he died at Naso on 28 March 1236, at an advanced age, and was buried in his native town. His relics were subsequently enshrined in Naso, where they have remained a focus of local pilgrimage, associated with the church that bears his name. Devotion to him is essentially a civic cult of Naso and the surrounding district rather than a universal cult. He is entered in the Roman Martyrology on 28 March, which is kept as his feast day, and he is honored as the principal patron saint of Naso. No papal bull of canonization in the later medieval or Tridentine form is known; like many Italo-Greek monks of Norman Sicily, he was recognized through popular veneration and local episcopal acceptance of his cult.

Because nearly all biographical particulars come from legendaria and municipal tradition compiled well after the thirteenth century, a cautious historian must distinguish the core of the cult from unverifiable narrative detail. What can be affirmed with reasonable confidence is that a Basilian monk named Conon, linked to Naso, was venerated there by the later Middle Ages, that his feast was fixed on 28 March, and that the town has continued to celebrate him as its patron. The exact years of birth and death, the names of his parents, the Jerusalem journey, and the vision of Becket's martyrdom remain traditional rather than critically documented. His figure nonetheless illustrates the survival of Basilian monasticism in Norman and Swabian Sicily and the process by which a local holy abbot became the enduring patron of a Sicilian comune.