Blessed Maria Antonia Samà

Maria Antonia Samà was born at Sant'Andrea Jonio in Calabria in 1875 into a very poor family. To help support them she never went to school but worked in the fields with her mother. Returning from the fields she drank contaminated water from a marsh and fell gravely ill, showing strange neurovegetative disturbances that everyone took to be diabolical; her temperament turned rebellious, with screaming and blasphemy. She was freed in 1894, when the baroness Enrichetta Scoppa brought her to the Charterhouse of Serra San Bruno for an exorcism, and she returned home to her work. Some three years later an arthritic disease confined her to bed, lying on her back with her knees raised, for nearly sixty years. Cared for by her mother until 1920 and afterwards by the townspeople, and formed by her parish priests, by the Reparatrix Sisters of the Sacred Heart and by the Redemptorist Father Carmine Cesarano, she made private vows of consecration about 1915, covered her head with a black veil, and was thereafter known as the Little Nun of Saint Bruno.

Her small house became the spiritual centre of the town.