Saint Agatha

Agatha was from Catania, just over twenty, and she was killed during the persecution of Decius, around 251, for never renouncing her faith. She is one of the most venerated martyrs of all Christian antiquity. Her written biography — interrogations, tortures, a resistance that doesn’t give way — is one of the very first examples of hagiographic literature in the history of the Church: the model on which dozens of later accounts were built. The oldest passio that has come down to us dates from around the year 1000 and is kept in Paris, at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, with illuminations in the margins. Then there’s something historians draw from her martyrdom, and it isn’t about her: proof that in Catania, already in the third century, there was a real Christian community. An inscription from 320 confirms it too, marking the burial of Iulia Florentina, a little girl who died at eighteen months. From the traces of two deaths, the life of a city is pieced back together. Today Agatha is patron saint of Catania, of Gallipoli, of the Republic of San Marino and of the island of Malta. Her relics rest in the cathedral that bears her name, and Catania dedicates to her a festival that lasts four days — February 3, 4, 5 and 6 — and is one of the biggest in Italy. If your name is Agatha, today is your name day. It’s a name carried with a special pride in Sicily, and in recent years it has come back elsewhere too. A twenty-year-old woman who didn’t give in, and a city that hasn’t let her go for eighteen hundred years.