Giovanni Pelingotto

Giovanni Pelingotto was born in 1240 in Urbino, in the Marches of central Italy, a city then lying within the political orbit of the Papal States. He belonged to a merchant family and was trained for commerce, working as a trader in adult life. Almost nothing strictly contemporary survives about his childhood or the details of his business career. The outline of his life is known chiefly from later hagiographical accounts gathered for local veneration and for the eighteenth-century confirmation of his cult. Those accounts describe a man who, after years spent in trade, underwent a religious conversion and turned away from the pursuit of wealth.

After this conversion Pelingotto entered the Third Order of Saint Francis, the lay Franciscan fraternity later called the Secular Franciscan Order, which allowed him to follow a Franciscan rule without becoming a friar. He gave largely to the poor, simplified his own way of living, and made pilgrimages to major shrines of medieval Christendom, including Santiago de Compostela and the tombs of the apostles in Rome. Back in Urbino he lived in a small cell near the Franciscan convent, joining prayer and penance to continued service of the sick and needy. Tradition remembers him for fasting, vigils, humility, and patience rather than for public office or written works.

In his later years he was already regarded in Urbino as a man of holiness, and people of the city and countryside sought him for spiritual counsel. He died in Urbino on 1 June 1304 and was buried in the Franciscan church of San Francesco there. A popular cult grew at his tomb over the following centuries. On 13 November 1723 Pope Innocent XIII confirmed that longstanding local cultus, which in the procedure of the time constituted beatification. Pelingotto has not been canonized. His liturgical memorial is kept on 1 June, the anniversary of his death. He remains a relatively obscure blessed, whose historical portrait rests on a modest body of later testimony rather than on a rich contemporary documentary record.