The new Roman Martyrology[3] acknowledges his forty years as a hermit, and a life marked by prayer and acts of penance.

On 12 September 1625, Pope Urban VIII allowed the Franciscans to use a distinct text for the Divine Office and Mass on the feast day.

A peasant discovered near where the fire is alleged to have begun was accused of starting the blaze, to be imprisoned, tortured to confess, and condemned to death.

The story continues that as the man was being led to execution, a remorseful Conrad had publicly admitted his guilt to the Signoria of the city.

Thus reduced to poverty, and seeking penance for his act of cowardice, Conrad and his wife had apparently seen the hand of God in the turn of events.

The tale relates that in 1343 Conrad had felt called by God to serve the local people more directly and had gone to the town of Netum (after earthquakes levelled it in the 1690s it was abandoned in 1703 and the inhabitants founded Noto).

At that time, apparently, the hermitage had been occupied by Blessed William Buccheri, a former equerry to King Frederick III of Sicily, said to have also taken up a life of solitude and prayer.

His fame had been such that by 1348 the Bishop of Syracuse, Giacomo Guidone de Franchis, had attended Conrad's hermitage to petition his prayers to relieve a famine afflicting Sicily.

[2] One supposedly contemporaneous account was of a visit to his hermitage by an old friend and companion-in-arms, Antonio da Stessa, from Daverio.

[1] The large number of miracles attributed to him is said to have prompted the city's leadership, soon after he died, to petition the Bishop of Syracuse, in whose diocese Noto then belonged, to begin the process towards canonisation.

In 1485, after the pause required by canon law, canonisation proceedings had been duly launched by Bishop Dalmazio Gabriele,[6] O.P., who was himself to testify having witnessed the Miracle of the Bread.