Agostina Livia Pietrantoni

[1] Pietrantoni worked as a nurse in the Santo Spirito hospital in Rome where she tended to ill victims in a tuberculosis ward before a patient murdered her in 1894.

[2] She refused offers of marriage – despite her mother's insistence – and so travelled to Rome with her priest uncle Matteo in January 1886 with the aim of entering consecrated life in order to pursue her vocation.

She bid farewell to her parents and left for Rome once more where she joined the congregation at Via Santa Maria in Cosmedin on 23 March 1886.

[3] On one particular occasion she was attacked and beaten because she had seized a knife from a patient and it worried the other religious despite Pietrantoni's insistence that she was fine and would continue to work.

The male patient Giuseppe Romanelli began to harass her at this point; he even sent her death threats.

Professor Achille Ballori – who had once warned her about Romanelli – inspected her remains and observed that "Sister Agostina has allowed herself to be slaughtered like a lamb" and noted there were no contractions of either her nerves or heart.