Saint Ansanus of Siena

The firm points are few. The archdiocese describes him as a young Roman, martyred at Dofana, near the Arbia, in the early fourth century during Diocletian's persecution, and treats his feast as the memory of the moment the Christian faith reached the land of Siena, coming from Rome by way of a martyr's witness. ¹ The encyclopedia agrees on Diocletian and on his place as Siena's first apostle. ⁵ Neither gives a year of birth or of death, and this page does not supply one.

The cult at Dofana is old. The earliest record of a church of Saint Ansanus there, the "ecclesia sancti Ansani," dates from the year 650, and his body was kept in the little church built over the place of his death until 1108. ³ The Church of Siena's own beginnings are hardly clearer. The same encyclopedia article says that a Bishop "Florianus a Sinna" who attended the Council of Rome in 313 is claimed by Siena as its first bishop, though other Italian cities claim him too; that the first bishop whose date is certain is Eusebius, in 465; and that the Lombard invasion broke the succession, which was restored only in 635. ⁵

What the archdiocese knows about him beyond that it knows from the hagiographies, the written lives that grew up around his cult. Its formation course for 2023-24 included a lecture on the message of those hagiographies, and the lecture's title called him the Baptist of the Sienese. ⁷ That is what the lives remember him for.

High in the city, on Via San Quirico, stands a small church known as the Carceri di Sant'Ansano, the prisons of Saint Ansanus. Tradition holds that he was imprisoned there and went on preaching and baptizing from his cell. ² The story the Sienese tell is that he had already been put through the ordeal of fire and of boiling oil and come out unharmed, and that as a prisoner he kept on with his work, baptizing the people of Siena through the little window of the jail. ² The archdiocese's account of the feast calls it the only place connected with Ansanus inside the city walls, and the place from which the Christian life of Siena began. ²

Preaching in the Carceri on the feast, Don Enrico Grassini described the young man as having come from Rome in the footsteps of the apostles Peter and Paul, to bring the Gospel, to baptize, and to bear witness with his life, through torture and martyrdom and finally beheading on the banks of the Arbia. ² The painting over the altar in the Carceri shows him before the Roman official Lisia, who condemns him; the priest pointed out that the young man's gaze is full of trust and serenity, and of pity for the authority judging him. ² Another fresco there, perhaps by Vecchietta, shows him baptizing a man and a woman drawn to look like Adam and Eve - the first Sienese, as the priest read it, opening the gates of paradise to those who came after them. ²

None of these details is claimed as documented. The archdiocese introduces them as what tradition holds, and its account of Dofana begins with what, according to tradition, is told. ²³ They are the memory of a city, and the page passes them on as that.

Dofana lies outside Siena, in what is now the municipality of Castelnuovo Berardenga, on the southern edge of the archdiocese, on the side that faces Rome. ³⁹ The church over the place of martyrdom was restored in the second half of the sixteenth century and again in the twentieth, and today stands, as the archdiocese puts it, as a place of peace and spirituality in the middle of the countryside. ³ The parish church of Saint Ansanus and Saint Isidore at Dofana has since been restored with funds from the Italian bishops' conference, and the blessing of the work was set for July 14, 2024, with the cardinal archbishop taking part. ⁹

When Augusto Paolo Lojudice came from Rome to become Archbishop of Siena, Dofana was his first stop, on the Sunday he began his ministry. He greeted the people one by one, then went into the oratory, venerated and incensed the relics, and asked those present to renew their profession of faith with him by reciting the Creed - the faith of the apostles, he said, witnessed by the saints to the shedding of their blood. ³

The feast still begins there. In 2025 first Vespers were sung on the evening of November 30 in the parish church of Santa Maria a Dofana, near the place of martyrdom. ¹

Siena's seventeen contrade, the historic districts of the city, begin their year on his feast. ¹ On December 1 the procession of the contrade sets out from the Palazzo Pubblico for the cathedral, where the archbishop celebrates a solemn Mass concelebrated by the Correttori, the priests attached to the contrade, in the presence of the Priors and the people of each district. ¹ Each year one contrada pays homage to the saint on behalf of all seventeen: the Civetta in 2023, the Giraffa in 2025. ¹⁶

Archbishop Antonio Buoncristiani, greeting the city on the feast, called it, together with the Assumption, the one occasion each year that shows the proud attachment of all Siena and its contrade to their traditions and historical roots. ¹⁰ He asked them to keep the religious roots of their festivals, which rest on popular piety. ¹⁰

He is in the city's most famous picture as well. In Duccio's Maestà, the great panel of the Virgin enthroned, Ansanus is at the Madonna's feet with the three other protectors of Siena, Crescentius, Savinus and Victor. ⁴ Cardinal Lojudice pointed out that the millions of visitors who stop each year to look at the Maestà are, in that sense, paying their respects to him. ⁴

Saint Ansanus is the principal patron of the city of Siena and of its archdiocese. ¹ A priest preaching on his feast put it as patron together with the Virgin Mary, and one diocesan account calls him co-patron. ² The sources read for this page name no trade, illness or cause under his protection, and this page does not add one.

His feast is December 1, and in Siena it is kept as a solemnity. ¹²⁶ The day begins with Mass at 11 in the Carceri on Via San Quirico; in the late afternoon the contrade process to the cathedral for the solemn Mass, and the cathedral choir gives a concert, in recent years on the theme of peace. ¹⁶ In 2024 the feast fell on the first Sunday of Advent, and the archdiocese described it as the memory of the faith of the apostles reaching Siena from Rome at the dawn of Christianity, made fruitful by the blood of martyrdom. ⁸

Cardinal Lojudice, preaching on the feast in his first year as a cardinal, defined a martyr as someone who wants life, not death, and commits to living in love whatever it costs. ⁴ It is a useful corrective for a saint whose story is told mainly in torments. The fire and the oil are what a legend remembers. What the city remembers is that he baptized.

The window in the Carceri is the image that stays. A prisoner with no freedom left still had a small opening onto the street, and he used it to give away the one thing he had. ² Most people who pray with him will never face a Roman official. Plenty of them know what it is to be confined - by illness, by duty, by circumstances they did not choose - and to wonder what can still be done from there.

Don Grassini called the visit to the Carceri a pilgrimage to the roots of the faith and a memory of one's own baptism. ² That is a good way to come to Ansanus from anywhere. Very little about him can be proved, and Siena does not pretend otherwise. ²³ What can be seen is a city that has kept faith with its first witness for something like seventeen centuries, returning to the same hill every December. ²