Rizziero della Muccia

Blessed Rizziero della Muccia, also known in the sources as Riccerio, Ricerio, Rizzieri, or Riccerius of Muccia, was a Franciscan friar of the first generation and a companion of Saint Francis of Assisi. He was born in Muccia, a town in the Marche of central Italy (the medieval March of Ancona), into a family of local nobility. No reliable source records the year of his birth; he belongs to the later twelfth century. Particulars of his childhood and education are not preserved in contemporary documents. Later tradition holds that he received a formation suited to his social rank and that he may have studied at Bologna before abandoning secular prospects.

His entry into the Order of Friars Minor is ascribed to the influence of Saint Francis, whose preaching and way of life drew a number of well-born young men of central Italy into the new brotherhood. Once a friar, Rizziero is remembered as one of those disciples for whom Francis felt a marked personal affection. Early Franciscan narrative collections, including material associated with the companions of the saint, depict Brother Riccerio as a man of tender conscience, at times afflicted by scruples, whom Francis comforted and of whose salvation the founder spoke with confidence. These episodes, hagiographical in form, constitute nearly all that can be said of Rizziero’s inner life and of his standing among the first brothers.

Rizziero appears to have remained connected with his native Marche, a region that received the Franciscan movement with particular intensity in the decades after 1209. No charters or chronicles assign him a major office such as provincial minister, nor do they describe extensive missionary journeys. According to a tradition that is consistent in later martyrologies and local memory, he died at Muccia on 7 February 1236 and was buried in the town. Devotion to him developed at his burial place. He has been venerated as Blessed in the Franciscan Order and in the local church; his feast is kept on 7 February.

The historical dossier is modest. Rizziero left no known writings, and he was not the subject of a substantial contemporary vita. Knowledge of him depends on brief notices in the early companion literature, on the continuity of cult in Muccia and among the Friars Minor, and on later compilations of Franciscan blesseds. Within those limits, his origin in Muccia, his place in the first Franciscan generation, the special regard attributed to Francis, his death in 1236, and the persistence of his local veneration may be stated with due caution. He remains a representative figure of the early, often poorly documented, expansion of the Lesser Brothers in the Marche.