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Town of Saint Margaret–Cortona, Tuscany

WITH HER INSPIRING MEMOIR OF RESTORING a house in Italy, Under the Tuscan Sun, author Frances Mayes put Cortona in the spotlight. It has everything on the CHECKLIST to fulfill the Tuscan hill town dream. Walls built by the Etruscans, which is where the name Tuscany comes from. A masterpiece Annunciation by Fra Angelico, in the Museo Diocesano. And a patron saint with a twisted story.

A steep, very steep, uphill walk from the Cortona historic center will take you to the place Saint Margaret once lived, where she’s buried and honored: the Chiesa di Santa Margherita. It’s a place that is worth the climb.

This is Saint Margaret’s story:

Once upon a time in the thirteenth century, there lived a beautiful, high-spirited farmer’s daughter named Margaret. Her mother died when she was young and Margaret’s father remarried some shrew who had an automatic hate-on for Margaret. Meanwhile beautiful Margaret kept her spirits up by enjoying the attention from all the young lads in her little town. But no matter how hard she tried to enjoy her lot, she had the gnawing “there’s gotta be something better than this” feeling. Lo and behold, along came a knight from Montepulciano who asked Margaret to come live with him…and work as his maid. Not insulted in the least, Margaret, then seventeen, jumped at the chance to get away from her evil stepmother. She moved into the knight’s castle and surprise, surprise, he couldn’t keep his hands off her. Before you know it, she got pregnant and gave birth to a son.

“Now will you marry me?” Margaret asked her knight. “Uh…umm…uh…no,” was his reply.

Margaret decided not to push it, looked on the bright side, and was grateful for her good fortune. She went out every day to help the poor, even though the townsfolk would come by and call her a tramp. “Ha-ha, someday I’ll be a saint,” was her reply.

Then one day her knight went off for a trip and didn’t come home as planned. But his dog did, and ala Lassie, led Margaret into the woods. There she came upon a horrifying sight: her knight murdered and rotting. Margaret had a suspicion that she was the cause of it. She knew other men wanted her, and they probably whacked her knight, thinking they could take his place. “It’s all my fault!” Margaret said. “If I weren’t so beautiful none of this would have happened!”

She decided to repent big time. She gave all the riches she’d gotten from the knight back to his family. She went home to her father and stepmother, all ready to confess that her whole life had been wrong up to this day. Her stepmother threw her out: “Wanton woman!”

In despair, she ran to Cortona, through a gate that’s now called the Porta Margherita. Huffing and puffing, she arrived at the Franciscan Friars. “Please let me in, I want to repent!” They weren’t going to make it so easy for her. To prove her faith, she put on a hair shirt. She fasted. She took out a knife and was all set to cut her beautiful nose off.

That’s when the Franciscan monk, Fra Giunta, stepped in and became her confessor. Many tongues began wagging: “They’re lovers!” But Giunta convinced his brothers that Margaret had suffered long enough, and after three years of penance they let her join their order.

Soon a miracle occurred. As Margaret was praying below a crucifix, Jesus himself leaned forward and whispered, “Poverella…” That began a whole bunch of conversation and ecstasies for Margaret.

Inspired, she went back to what she’d been doing in the first place when everyone called her a tramp: helping the poor. This time it was the poor of Cortona, and she really put muscle into it. She started an order of nuns she called “le Poverelle,” founded a hospital for the poor and sick, and a charity organization—The Confraternity of Our Lady of Mercy—to support the hospital.

As she got older, Margaret wanted peace and quiet. So she moved up the hill to the Church of Saint Basil, and had it repaired. She died there in 1297. Immediately the people of Cortona forgot about Saint Basil, named the place Chiesa di Santa Margherita, and started rebuilding it. What you see up there now is mainly from the church’s nineteenth century renovation.

Margaret’s body is in an open tomb above the high altar. She was canonized in 1728, as the Patroness of Fallen Women.

The view from up there—the rolling hills of the Val di Chiana—is awesome.

Golden Day: Visit the Museo Diocesano to see Fra Angelico’s Annunciation, then walk to the Chiesa di Santa Margherita. Eat and stay near Cortona at Il Falconiere (www.ilfalconiere.com), a converted eighteenth-century country villa that’s been elegantly turned into a Relais & Châteaux hotel.

Tourist Info: www.cortona.com