Blessed Emilia Bicchieri

Emilia Bicchieri, OP (3 May 1238 – 3 May 1314) was an Italian Catholic nun of the Dominican Order. Born to a patrician, she is best known for founding a convent in her hometown of Vercelli, where she served as prioress. Bicchieri was beatified in 1769 by Pope Clement XIV. Emilia Bicchieri was born in 1238 in Vercelli as the fourth of seven girls to Pietro Bicchieri, a patrician of noble stock. She was baptized sometime in the month of her birth. In her childhood, she often sang psalms in the house and retreated to her room for spiritual reflection. In her adolescence, she staved off her father's attempts for her to enter an advantageous marriage. Before her birth, her mother had a vivid dream in which she saw the future work of her daughter. She told this to a Dominican friar who told her that she would bear a daughter and that the dream was a clear sign that the unborn child would become a saint. In her childhood Bicchieri was taught to read and to embroider, and was considered her father's favourite despite emptying her purse as quickly as he could fill it – she provided alms to the poor with tender affection. Her three older sisters concerned themselves with advantageous marriages for greater wealth while she shunned such things as vain. Bicchieri's ambitions in 1254 were to become a nun but she did not know which order she would enter. In 1256 she decided her call was to serve God as a professed nun in the Order of Preachers. Her father bowed to pressure and in 1255 decided to oversee the construction of an establishment that his daughter could found in her name and use for religious purposes. Her father died after the convent was constructed in 1255, which came as a tremendous blow to her for she was devoted to her father; she had dreaded informing him of her decision to become a nun.