Saint Alexius

Alexius is one of those saints whose story has come down by three different roads — a Syriac one, a Greek one and a Roman one — and none of the three fully matches the others. The Syriac version, the oldest, tells of a patrician, the son of Euphemianus and Aglaë, who on the very evening of his wedding persuaded his bride to give up the marriage. He took ship for the East and reached Edessa, where he became a beggar. What he collected by day he gave away in the evening to other poor people. Because of the way he lived they called him Mar-Riscia, the man of God. He died in a hospital in that city, and only then did people learn who he was. The Roman version, which is later, adds the part that made the story famous all over Europe. Alexius is said to have returned to Rome without making himself known, and to have lived for seventeen years under the stairs of his own house, kept alive by the alms of his own parents, who didn’t recognize him. They found out only at his death, from a sheet of paper he held in his hand. In the eleventh century a short poem about him was written in French, the *Vie de saint Alexis*, which is one of the first literary texts in a European vernacular and spread his cult everywhere. In Rome, on the Aventine, the church of Santi Bonifacio e Alessio still keeps, beneath an altar, what tradition identifies as the staircase. If your name is Alexis, today is your name day.