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Biography

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Villana de' Botti was born in Florence in 1332, the daughter of Andrea de' Botti, a member of a prosperous mercantile family in the Republic of Florence. In childhood she received a religious upbringing and is said to have shown a strong inclination toward piety, even wishing to enter a convent. Her father instead arranged a marriage for her with Rosso di Piero Benintendi, a man of similar social standing. After her marriage, according to the traditional accounts of her life, she set aside her earlier devout habits and adopted the luxurious and worldly manner of life common among the Florentine elite of the mid-fourteenth century, occupying herself with fine dress and social vanities.

The turning point in her life is described in the hagiographical tradition as a sudden conversion. Looking into a mirror, she is said to have seen not her own features but a demonic or hideous countenance, which she interpreted as a revelation of the condition of her soul. Filled with remorse, she abandoned her former vanities, adopted a life of penance and prayer, and sought to repair what she regarded as years of spiritual neglect. She became a professed member of the Third Order of Saint Dominic, associating herself with the Dominican friars of the convent of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, and thereafter lived as a lay Dominican while remaining in the married state.

As a tertiary she devoted herself to frequent reception of the sacraments, to the reading of Sacred Scripture and the Fathers of the Church, and to works of mercy among the poor and the sick of Florence. She practiced notable austerities and was reputed to have been favored with mystical graces, including visions and ecstasies, as well as to have endured interior trials. She became known in the city for her penitential life and her charity, and she maintained close spiritual ties with the Dominican community. Contemporary and later accounts present her as a model of conversion and of lay holiness within the Dominican family in fourteenth-century Tuscany.

Villana de' Botti died in Florence on 29 January 1361, at about twenty-nine years of age. She was buried in the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella, where popular veneration of her memory began soon after her death and where her tomb attracted the devotion of the faithful. Her cult remained local for centuries. In 1824 Pope Leo XII confirmed her longstanding cult, an act equivalent to beatification, and she is honored in the Catholic Church as Blessed Villana de' Botti. Her feast day is observed on 29 January.

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