[4] Patricius reportedly had a violent temper and appears to have been of dissolute habits; apparently his mother exhibited similar behaviours.

But Monica's relief at Augustine's recovery turned to anxiety as he misspent his renewed life being wayward and, as he himself says, lazy.

In his book Confessions, Augustine wrote of a peculiar practice of his mother in which she "brought to certain oratories, erected in the memory of the saints, offerings of porridge, bread, water and wine.

So, Augustine wrote of her: In place of a basket filled with fruits of the earth, she had learned to bring to the oratories of the martyrs a heart full of purer petitions, and to give all that she could to the poor – so that the communion of the Lord's body might be rightly celebrated in those places where, after the example of his passion, the martyrs had been sacrificed and crowned.Monica and her son spent six peaceful months at Rus Cassiciacum (present-day Cassago Brianza) after which Augustine was baptized by Ambrose in the church of St John the Baptist at Milan.

The fragment was discovered after two boys were digging a hole to plant a football post in the courtyard beside Santa Aurea.

[8] A translation from Latin by Douglas Boin reads: Here the most virtuous mother of a young man set her ashes, a second light to your merits, Augustine.

Later the archbishop of Rouen, Guillaume d'Estouteville, built a church at Rome in honour of Augustine, the Basilica di Sant'Agostino, and deposited the relics of Saint Monica in a chapel to the left of the high altar.

A legend states that in the 18th century Father Juan Crespí named a local dripping spring Las Lágrimas de Santa Mónica ("Saint Monica’s Tears"; today known as the Serra Springs) that was reminiscent of the tears that Monica shed over her son's early impiety.

In the oratorio La conversione di Sant'Agostino (1750) composed by Johann Adolph Hasse (libretto by Duchess Maria Antonia of Bavaria), Monica's role in the conversion of her son Augustine is dramatized.

[15] In “The Angel of Warning,” the fifth episode of season 3 of the TV series Evil, David claims Monica was black, although traditionally portrayed as white in religious art.

[3] In the tenth episode of season 3, he calls on St. Monica while jogging past a demonic apparition of sexual temptation in the guise of his colleague Kristen.