In the year 1381 there was born in a peasant home at Roccaporena in the central Apennines a little girl who, as an exemplary daughter, wife and religious, was destined to attain to great heights of holiness in this life, and afterwards to merit from countless grateful souls by her intercession in Heaven the title of “the saint of the impossible and the advocate of desperate cases”. —Butler’s Lives of the Saints,  © 1956