Seven Florentine merchants leave the city for a hill eleven miles north

FLORENCE, Tuscany, September 8, 1233 AD — Seven merchants of Florence walked out of the city this week, on the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. They stopped at La Camarzia, a suburb just beyond the walls, next to the convent of the Friars Minor. They had settled their affairs before they went: they left their families what those families needed and gave everything else to the poor. They are not going back to their shops.

They are St. Bonfilius Monaldi, St. Bonajunta Manetti, St. Manettus dell’Antella, St. Amideus Amidei, St. Hugh Uguccioni, St. Sosthenes Sostegni and St. Alexis Falconieri. Until this week they lived by buying and selling the goods of this world. All seven came from old and wealthy Florentine families. They were in different states of life: some had never married, having vowed themselves to celibacy; some were married men; some had lost their wives.

They were at the devotions of their confraternity, the Laudesi (the Praisers of Mary), three weeks ago, on August 15, the feast of the Assumption. The Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to them there and advised them to leave the world and give themselves entirely to eternal things. They put the plan to Bishop Ardingo of Florence, and he encouraged it. They asked the advice of men of good judgment as well. Then they put on a plain black habit.

The city behind them lives on cloth. Florence is foremost among the cities of Italy in the woollen industry, above all in the dyeing and the finishing of the goods that leave it. For years the seven had also belonged to an old Florentine guild dedicated to the Blessed Virgin. It was old enough, and had enough holy men and women in it, to be called the Major Guild of Our Blessed Lady.

La Camarzia is barely out of Florence, and the Franciscans are next door. It gave the seven less seclusion than they wanted, so they went on.

Monte Senario lies eleven miles north of the city. The seven climbed to the top and built a small house on the summit. There they live in common. They have begun to take others in as well. They came to see that they were called not only to sanctify themselves but to build up the new order.

The next year Bishop Ardingo gave them the land on the mountain outright, because they wanted to live poor and away from the world. They built a small church there in honour of Mary and set their cells around it. They spent their days in prayer and in meditating on the sufferings of Jesus and Mary. In 1239 AD they took the sorrows of Mary, standing under the Cross, as the principal devotion of their order.

St. Alexis Falconieri outlived the other six. He died at Florence in 1310 AD, at the age of a hundred and ten. A friar who joined the order while he was still alive heard the account of the founding from him and set it down in the order’s records, the Monumenta (Records). “When I entered this order I found only one of the seven still alive, Brother Alexis, whom our Lady was pleased to preserve from death down to our own time so that we might listen to his account of the founding of the order,” the friar wrote. Of the seven together he wrote: “They were like seven stars joined together to form a constellation.”

All seven are buried in one tomb on the mountain they climbed this week. Pope Leo XIII placed them together in the catalogue of the saints in 1888 AD. The Roman Martyrology keeps them by the name of the hill: “In Tuscany, on Mount Senario, the seven Holy Founders of the Order of Servites of the Blessed Virgin Mary.”