[note 1] Olivia seems to have been sanctified by popular tradition alone as a pious local saint since her name was not recorded historically in any mainstream Latin or Greek martyrology or Hagiology of the church.

In addition, numerous Lives of this Saint were published in Sicily, both in prose and in verse, and the form of sacred representation until the end of the eighteenth century, reflecting the fair vitality of her cult.

The governor, therefore, ordered that she be relegated to a lonely place as a hermitess, where there were wild animals, hoping that the beasts would devour her or that she would die of hunger.

Finally, she was beheaded on 10 June of the year 463 or sometime in the 10th century, and her soul "flew to the sky in the form of a dove" (Italian: "sotto forma di colomba volò al cielo").

[3][10] It was begun in 1893, replacing the oldest Christian monument in the city – a chapel built by Father Jean Le Vacher in 1650 – and was opened on Christmas Day 1897.

[citation needed] Another account, transmitted by the 17th century Tunisian historian Ibn Abi Dinar,[14] reports the presence of a Byzantine Christian church dedicated to Santa Olivia at that location.

[14] A more recent scholarly interpretation by Muhammad al-Badji Ibn Mami, also endorsed by Sihem Lamine, suggests that the previous structures may have been part of a Byzantine fortification.

[12][15] Olivia is particularly venerated in Tunisia because it is superstitiously thought that if the site and its memory are profaned, then misfortune will happen; this includes a belief that when her relics are recovered, Islam will end.

[4] In 1402 king Martin I of Sicily requested the return of Saint Olivia's relics from the Berber Caliph of Ifriqiya Abu Faris Abd al-Aziz II, who refused him.

[3] The main criticism of the life of Olivia is that the elements of her legend do not have a personal nature in and of themselves, but they all derive, with slight modifications, from old themes or archetypes that were dear to the medieval imagination, such as that of the 'sacred heroine' or the 'persecuted maiden' .

[18] The Italian teacher and writer Giuseppe Agnello carefully undertook to sift the hagiographic tradition from the literary one and did not see anything more than a random homonymous saint of Palermo conflated with the heroine of the mystery play dedicated to her, which was studied extensively by Alessandro d'Ancona[19] and Alexander Veselovsky (who in turn cited Ferdinand Wolf[20]).