Conrad of Piacenza

Conrad of Piacenza, known in Italian as Corrado Confalonieri, belongs to the late medieval Franciscan penitential tradition. According to the hagiographical accounts on which his cult depends, he was born in the later thirteenth century at Calendasco, near Piacenza in the Po Valley of northern Italy, into the Confalonieri family, a lineage of local nobility that held the locality as a fief. Raised among the landed aristocracy, he married a woman of similar rank. The turning point of his life, as the legend relates it, came during a hunt. In order to flush game from cover, he had brushwood fired; the flames, driven by the wind, spread through fields and woods and caused extensive damage. A poor countryman found near the scene was seized, charged with starting the fire, and condemned to death. Conrad, struck by remorse, came forward, confessed that he himself was responsible, and thereby delivered the innocent man from execution.

Together with his wife he then disposed of their property in order to indemnify those whose land and crops had been destroyed. Thereafter both spouses embraced religious life. Conrad took the habit of the Third Order of Saint Francis and withdrew to live as a hermit, while his wife is said to have entered a community of Poor Clare nuns. After a period of eremitical life in his native region of Piacenza, Conrad left northern Italy. He is described as having gone on pilgrimage to Rome and then as having continued southward to Sicily, which in the fourteenth century formed a separate kingdom under Aragonese rule. In the Val di Noto he took up the life of a hermit, associated in the tradition with the hill country of Pizzoni and with the district around Noto. There he is believed to have remained for some three decades, occupying himself in prayer, austerity, and assistance to the poor. Later writers attribute to him a reputation for holiness already during his lifetime, including reports of miraculous healings.

He died in Sicily on a date kept as 19 February, in the year 1351 according to the received chronology, and was buried at Noto. Local veneration developed around his tomb, which became a pilgrimage site, and collections of miracle stories were attached to his name. In 1515 Pope Leo X confirmed the public cult. Conrad is recorded in the Roman Martyrology on 19 February as a confessor of the Third Order of Saint Francis.

He is invoked as patron of the city of Noto and of Calendasco, and popular devotion has long sought his intercession against hernias. His relics are preserved in Noto and are associated with the cathedral church of San Nicolò. The historical record independent of the later vita is sparse, and the narrative of the fire, the condemned peasant, and the joint conversion of husband and wife belongs to hagiographical tradition rather than to documents contemporary with the events; nonetheless that tradition has been the basis of his liturgical cult and of his memory in both Emilia and southeastern Sicily.