Ludovica Albertoni

Ludovica Albertoni was born in 1473 in Rome, into the noble Albertoni family, during the later fifteenth century when the city was the capital of the Papal States. She belonged to the Roman aristocracy and, in keeping with the customs of her rank, was married young to Giacomo della Cetera. The marriage produced three daughters. While living as a wife and mother she already had a reputation for piety and for concern for the poor, though the surviving record of her early life is thin and later hagiography supplies much of the colour that surrounds her youth.

Her husband died in 1506. As a widow she did not remarry. She disposed of a large part of her property in alms and entered the Third Order of Saint Francis, becoming a Franciscan tertiary. From that point her life was given over to prayer, fasting, and works of mercy among the sick and destitute of Rome. Contemporary and near-contemporary notices present her as a mystic who experienced ecstasies and who practised notable austerities. She remained a laywoman in the world rather than a cloistered nun, and her charity was exercised in the streets and households of the city as well as in association with the Franciscans.

She died in Rome on 31 January 1533 and was buried in the Franciscan church of San Francesco a Ripa in Trastevere, with which she had been closely connected. A local cult grew around her tomb. In the seventeenth century the Altieri family, related to the Albertoni, promoted her cause. Cardinal Paluzzo Paluzzi Altieri degli Albertoni commissioned Gian Lorenzo Bernini to execute the marble group of the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni for her chapel in that church; the sculpture, completed in the mid-1670s, shows her in a state of mystical transport or dying ecstasy and is one of Bernini’s late masterpieces.

Pope Clement X, himself of the Altieri family, beatified her on 28 January 1671. She has never been canonized and is therefore styled Blessed rather than Saint. Her liturgical feast is kept on 31 January. Beyond the Roman cult and the fame of Bernini’s monument, the documentary basis for her inner life remains limited; much of what is repeated about visions and miracles belongs to later pious tradition rather than to a rich contemporary archive. She is remembered as a Roman noble widow, Franciscan tertiary, and servant of the poor of early sixteenth-century Rome.