Saint Conrad Confalonieri

This is the story of a man who set half the countryside on fire and let someone else take the blame. For three days. Conrad Confalonieri was born in 1290 in Calendasco, into a noble family of Piacenza. One day he was out hunting with friends and relatives and the hunt was going nowhere, so he ordered the brush to be set alight to drive out the game. The wind rose. The fire took woods, houses, huts. Conrad and his companions ran home and decided to say nothing. In the city, people immediately suspected a political attack by the Guelphs against the Ghibelline government, and they went looking for the culprit. They found one: a poor farmer, who was condemned. This is where the story turns. When Conrad heard about the sentence, he could find no peace: **he stopped the procession taking the man to his execution**, asked for an audience with the Lord of Piacenza and declared himself guilty. All his lands were confiscated to pay for the damage. He lost everything. From then on his life changed completely. He became a Franciscan tertiary and then a pilgrim, and ended up in Sicily, in Noto, where he lived as a hermit until his death in 1351. If your name is Conrad, today is your name day: a strong name, the kind that doesn’t get shortened. There’s one thing that makes this story different from the others: he didn’t repent before he was found out, and he was never found out at all. He could have kept quiet his whole life. He spoke up when speaking up cost him everything.