Philippa Mareri

Philippa Mareri, known in Italian as Filippa Mareri, was a noblewoman of the Rieti valley who became one of the early followers of the Franciscan movement and the foundress of a community of Poor Clares in central Italy. She was born in the late twelfth century at the castle of Mareri, in the mountainous country of the upper Salto, in what is now the province of Rieti in Lazio. The Mareri were a feudal family of some local importance; later tradition names a brother, Thomas (Tommaso) Mareri, as the relative who most strongly opposed her religious plans. The precise year of her birth is not recorded in contemporary documents and is given only approximately in later hagiography, commonly in the last years of the twelfth century. The region in which she grew up was one in which Francis of Assisi preached and founded hermitages, notably at Greccio, and in which the new penitential and mendicant ideals spread rapidly among both men and women of the lesser nobility.

Drawn to a life of evangelical poverty and prayer, Philippa refused the marriage that her family intended for her and sought to live according to the example of Clare of Assisi and the sisters of San Damiano. Traditional accounts relate that, after conflict with her relatives, she left the castle with a small group of companions and took refuge in a cave in the mountains, a site later identified as the Grotta di Santa Filippa. There the women lived in austerity until Franciscan friars helped them to obtain a more stable dwelling. A monastery of the Order of Saint Clare was established at Borgo San Pietro, a village in the valley below. Philippa became its first abbess. The foundation belongs to the first generation of Clarissan houses in the Papal territories of Sabina and the Rieti basin, though the surviving narrative of the foundation is hagiographical rather than archival in character, and the exact year of the community’s beginning is not independently fixed.

As abbess she is described as governing with humility and severity of life, in keeping with the early Poor Clare observance of enclosure, fasting, and manual work. She died at the monastery on 16 February 1236. Her body was kept at Borgo San Pietro and was reported to be incorrupt, which encouraged a local cult. Pilgrims visited the tomb, and the monastery itself came in time to bear her name. The Holy See confirmed the immemorial cult in the early nineteenth century: on 30 April 1806 Pope Pius VII authorized her public veneration, and she is therefore styled Blessed. Her feast is kept on 16 February, the traditional anniversary of her death. She has not been canonized in a formal papal ceremony and remains in the rank of the beati.

Devotion to Blessed Philippa Mareri has remained concentrated in the Rieti valley and in Franciscan and Clarissan circles. The monastery at Borgo San Pietro, in the present-day comune of Petrella Salto, continues to house her relics and to serve as the principal place of her cult. She is invoked as a local patron of Petrella Salto and of Borgo San Pietro. Historical knowledge of her life depends largely on later legendaries and on the continuity of the monastery she founded; few if any strictly contemporary charters naming her have been published, and details such as conversations with Francis of Assisi or the precise circumstances of her flight from home cannot be verified from independent thirteenth-century sources. What can be affirmed with reasonable confidence is that a noblewoman of the Mareri family established a community of Poor Clares at Borgo San Pietro in the first decades of the thirteenth century, that she died there in 1236, and that an enduring cult, later confirmed by Rome, grew up around her tomb.