Monastero di Santa Rita (Monastero delle Agostiniane)

Behind the basilica of Cascia stands the enclosed monastery where Margherita Lotti spent forty years as an Augustinian nun. The historic complex preserves the old choir, the thorn oratory and Rita's cell, with objects associated with her life.

Why it matters

This is the historic heart of the Rita devotion. In the early fifteenth century the young widow, then in her thirties, was received into a community dedicated to Santa Maria Maddalena and lived here under the Rule of Saint Augustine until her death on the night of 21–22 May 1457. Everything the world associates with her — the thorn wound, the vine that flowered from a dry stump, the forgiveness of her husband's killers — belongs to these cloistered rooms. The monastery's Augustinian community followed a contemplative life of prayer and service. Its abbess, Madre Maria Teresa Fasce, imagined and built the great basilica next door in the twentieth century.

What to notice

The oldest part of the building dates to the late thirteenth century. In the cloister, tradition says, the novice watered a dry wooden stake in obedience to her abbess and it put out leaves and grapes; the vine still grows there, and small holes in the wall house mason bees, which local devotion links to the legend of white bees swarming around Rita's cradle. In the ancient choir she received the Augustinian habit — the story goes that after her first refusals, her three patron saints carried her inside through locked doors. The Oratory of the Crucifix commemorates the wound of 1432, when a thorn detached from a crucifix fixed itself in her forehead; an epitaph records that she bore the spina for fifteen years. Her cell is associated with her wedding ring and rosary, alongside the gilded Baroque urn that held her body from 1745 to 1930. Beside it stands the Cassa Solenne, the chest made by Mastro Cicco Barbaro that kept her remains from her death until 1745 and carries the earliest known image of her.

Context and history

The community's medieval building was enlarged in the first half of the eighteenth century with donations from King John V of Portugal, who credited Rita's intercession with his recovery from a cancer of the cheek. The last great expansion was architectural rather than monastic: the adjacent basilica, consecrated in 1947, reordered the site around the growing devotion to Rita. Beatification proceedings opened under Urban VIII on 19 October 1626, and the monastery's own records fed the early cult; the first miracles after her death were registered in the Codex miraculorum within the same year, 1457. The garden roseto inside the complex recalls the rose and figs gathered in midwinter from her garden at Roccaporena.