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Maria Troncatti was born on 16 February 1883 in Corteno Golgi, a mountain village in the province of Brescia in Lombardy, northern Italy. She grew up in a large, devout Catholic family of rural means. Drawn early to religious life and to the care of the sick, she entered the Institute of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians, the Salesian Sisters founded by Saint John Bosco and Saint Mary Domenica Mazzarello. She made her religious profession in the first decade of the twentieth century and was trained as a nurse. During the First World War she served as a Red Cross nurse at Varazze on the Ligurian coast, attending wounded soldiers and acquiring medical experience that later shaped her missionary work.

In 1922 her congregation sent her to Ecuador. After an initial period in the Andean highlands, she was assigned in the mid-1920s to the eastern Amazonian region, among the Shuar people of what is now Morona Santiago province. For the rest of her life she worked principally in and around Macas and the forest settlements of the Ecuadorian Oriente. In conditions of isolation, scarce supplies, and frequent tension between indigenous communities and settlers, she served as nurse, midwife, dentist, and, when necessity required, as a frontier surgeon. She treated tropical illnesses, assisted at childbirth, and performed operations with rudimentary means. She also taught catechism, supported the schooling of girls, and often acted as a mediator in local conflicts. Among the Shuar she was known as madrecita (little mother).

Her apostolate joined healthcare, evangelization, and social peace. She helped to found and sustain mission stations, infirmaries, and schools, and she remained especially close to women and families. Accounts from the missions describe her as practical, indefatigable, and formed by the Salesian educational method of reason, religion, and loving-kindness. She spent some forty-seven years in eastern Ecuador, leaving the region only infrequently.

On 25 August 1969, at the age of eighty-six, she boarded a small aircraft at Sucúa in order to travel to Quito for a community retreat. The plane crashed in the jungle shortly after takeoff, and she was killed together with the other occupants. Her remains were recovered and buried at the Salesian mission in Macas. Popular devotion to her grew among both settlers and Shuar. After the introduction of her cause, she was beatified on 24 November 2012 in Macas by Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, acting in the name of Pope Benedict XVI. Her liturgical memorial is kept on 25 August, the day of her death.

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