Saint Rosalia

Saint Rosalia, venerated in Sicily as Santa Rosalia and popularly called La Santuzza (the Little Saint), is by tradition a twelfth-century noblewoman who lived as a hermit near Palermo. Traditional accounts place her birth about 1130 in Palermo, in the Kingdom of Sicily, and name her father as Sinibald, lord of Roses (delle Rose) and of Quisquina. Later genealogies that attach her to the Norman royal house or to Charlemagne are pious elaborations without contemporary support. Virtually nothing about her childhood or youth can be confirmed from twelfth-century sources. The received vita states that she left aristocratic life while still young, declined marriage, and embraced a life of prayer, fasting, and solitude as a consecrated virgin.

According to the same tradition she first withdrew to a cave on Monte Quisquina, in the interior of Sicily near what is now Santo Stefano Quisquina, and subsequently settled in a cave on Monte Pellegrino, the mountain overlooking Palermo. There she is said to have died on 4 September, in 1166 according to the date most often given in modern reference works, though some older authorities prefer about 1160. No chronicle of her own century records these events, and after her death her name largely disappeared from surviving written record, even if local memory of a holy woman on Monte Pellegrino may have persisted in oral form. The caves later associated with her at Quisquina and on Monte Pellegrino became pilgrimage sites only after her cult was revived in the seventeenth century.

The historically attested foundation of her fame is the plague that struck Palermo in 1624. Narratives composed at that time relate that Rosalia appeared in a vision, commonly said to have been granted to a hunter on Monte Pellegrino, and revealed the location of her remains. Bones were taken from the cave, identified as hers, and carried in procession through the city; the epidemic was believed to have ended in consequence. In 1625 the Senate of Palermo declared her the principal patroness of the city. A sanctuary was built at the cave on Monte Pellegrino, where her relics have since been the focus of pilgrimage, and further relics were placed in Palermo Cathedral. The civic-religious festival known as the Festino di Santa Rosalia, held on 14 and 15 July to commemorate the finding and translation of the relics, became one of the great public celebrations of Sicily. The Roman Martyrology lists her on 4 September, the traditional day of her death.

Because almost all details of her life depend on hagiography written or expanded in the seventeenth century, historians treat the twelfth-century biography with caution and cannot demonstrate her existence with the same certainty available for better-documented medieval saints. Her public cult, however, is well established. She is invoked as patron of Palermo and of Sicily and against plague and pestilence, and she is also honored at Santo Stefano Quisquina. In art she appears as a young hermit, often crowned with roses, holding a crucifix, accompanied by a skull, or shown in the cave of Monte Pellegrino. Traditional sources present her as an unmarried virgin without children; she held no papal or patriarchal office and did not belong to a later, formally constituted religious order. She was not the subject of a modern beatification or canonization process of the post-Tridentine type; recognition of her cult followed the events of 1624–1625, during the pontificate of Urban VIII.