Ubald

Saint Ubald, known in Italian as Ubaldo Baldassini, was a twelfth-century bishop of Gubbio in Umbria and remains that city's principal patron. He was born of the noble Baldassini family of Gubbio in the later eleventh century; later tradition commonly places his birth around 1084, though no precisely documented birth year survives. His father died while Ubald was still a child, and he was thereafter raised and educated among the cathedral clergy of Gubbio. He entered the cathedral chapter as a canon, received priestly ordination, and from early adulthood worked to restore a genuine common life among his fellow canons, including shared goods and a more austere routine modeled on the Rule of Saint Augustine. After a fire devastated Gubbio in the 1120s he used his own resources to aid reconstruction. He also went to Rome to obtain papal confirmation of the reformed observance of the Gubbio chapter.

When the see of Perugia fell vacant, Ubald was pressed to accept that bishopric and refused. In 1128 he was chosen bishop of his native Gubbio and accepted only under the pressure of obedience. His episcopate lasted more than thirty years. Contemporary and near-contemporary accounts, including a life written by Bishop Theobald of Gubbio not long after Ubald's death, portray him as an austere, charitable, and peace-making prelate who intervened personally to halt civic factional violence and wars with neighboring communes. In 1155, as the Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa moved through central Italy, Ubald went out to meet him and obtained imperial protection for Gubbio, sparing the city the sack that overtook other towns. In later life he endured severe bodily illness with a patience that became central to his cult, and he already had a reputation for miracles of healing and of deliverance from evil spirits.

Ubald died in Gubbio on 16 May 1160. He was first buried in the cathedral; his relics were later translated to a church built on Monte Ingino above the city, now the Basilica of Sant'Ubaldo, where his body is still preserved and displayed for veneration and has long been described as incorrupt. Pope Celestine III canonized him in 1192. Devotion to him has remained especially intense in Gubbio. On the eve of his feast the city holds the Corsa dei Ceri, in which teams race enormous wooden ceri crowned with statues of saints, including Ubald, up the mountain to the basilica. Beyond Gubbio he is invoked against demonic possession, migraine, neuralgia, and states of obsession, patronages that reflect both medieval miracle stories and the tradition of his own sufferings.