Saint Martina

Martina was a Roman patrician of the third century, and according to hagiography she was martyred under the emperor Alexander Severus. The account of her life is a legendary *passio*, the kind built to strike the imagination: arrested for openly professing her faith, she was dragged before the statue of Apollo, then that of Diana, then that of Jupiter, and each time the statue shattered and the temple collapsed. They threw her to the beasts, and the lion that was supposed to tear her apart crouched at her feet like a pet. In the end they tortured her with iron hooks — that’s how you recognize her in paintings — and beheaded her at the tenth milestone of the Via Ostiense. Her story closely resembles those of Saint Tatiana and Saint Prisca, and scholars have noticed it for a long time: they were tales that circulated and looked alike, like folk songs. What is documented starts later. In the seventh century Pope Honorius I dedicated a church to her near the Roman Forum, the one we know today as the Church of Saints Luke and Martina. The cult suddenly came back to life in 1634, when excavations beneath that church uncovered the tomb of the martyrs, and Pope Urban VIII set her feast on January 30, making her one of the patron saints of Rome. In Martina Franca, which bears her very name, the cult began in 1730, when Cardinal Irido Caracciolo gave his hometown a relic of the martyr. In Lombardy there’s also a farmers’ proverb: “Santa Martina la tra giò gran farina” — on Saint Martina’s day, flour is handed out. If your name is Martina, today is your name day, and it’s a name that in recent decades has taken over half of Italy.