blessed ugolino of gualdo cattaneo

Blessed Ugolino attracted people of his day by his interesting way of life.

Ugolino was born toward the beginning of the thirteenth century in either Gualdo Cattaneo (Perugia), Italy, not far from Foligno, or Bevagna, Italy. He joined the Augustinians and lived as a hermit.

He practiced a rigorous spiritual life, marked by frequent fasts, lengthy prayer, and strict silence. One of the hermitages he dwelled in for a long time was that of Saint John near Bevagna. In 1258 the townspeople of Gualdo desired to have in their midst this model of holiness, so they approached the Benedictine monks of Saint Pancratius in Rome and asked them to give to the Gualdo community, and, by its mediation, to the Augustinians, a little monastery and church that the Benedictines owned there but had left abandoned for some time. Blessed Ugolino accepted this former Benedictine monastery in Gualdo and introduced the Augustinian way of life there, becoming the new community’s first prior. His stay there was brief, however, for he died on 1 January 1260, and was buried in the monastery church, renamed the church of Saint Augustine.

Immediately after his death the people of Gualdo began to frequent his tomb and invoke his intercession. In 1262 his remains were transferred to the mother church of Saints Anthony and Antoninus for protection from devotees of Bevagna who wished to claim them as their own.

His feast is celebrated by the Augustinian Family on 8 January.