Venerable Agostina Livia Picapiedra

Agostina Pietrantoni (27 March 1864 – 13 November 1894) born Livia Pietrantoni, was an Italian religious sister of the Sisters of Divine Charity. Pietrantoni worked as a nurse in the Santo Spirito hospital in Rome where she tended to ill victims in a tuberculosis ward before a patient murdered her in 1894. Her canonisation was celebrated on 18 April 1999 in Saint Peter's Square. Olivia or Livia Pietrantoni was born on 27 March 1864 in Pozzaglia Sabina, about 50 kilometres north-east of Rome, as the second of eleven children to the poor farmers Francesco Pietrantoni and Caterina Costantini. She made her First Communion in 1868 and then received her Confirmation just under a decade later in 1876. Pietrantoni started work in 1871 and she worked doing manual labour for road construction and later in 1876 left for Tivoli with other adolescent seasonal workers during the winter months for the olive harvest. She refused offers of marriage – despite her mother's insistence – and so travelled to Rome with her priest uncle Matteo in January 1886 with the aim of entering consecrated life in order to pursue her vocation. When she sent a letter of admission to their generalate in Rome, the Sisters of Divine Charity declined her request. Pietrantoni persisted in finding a place to pursue her call and a few months later was accepted into the congregation. She bade farewell to her parents and left for Rome once more where she joined the congregation in the Via Santa Maria in Cosmedin on 23 March 1886. She assumed the religious name of Agostina upon her clothing ceremony on 13 August 1887. Sister Agostina was sent to the Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome as a nurse on 13 August 1887 and remained there until her death. While working in the tuberculosis ward she contracted the disease herself but recovered and so was sent to the ward herself in 1889 to tend to ill patients there.