She dreams of a husband, not the monastery. Her name is Clarice, she is very beautiful and has her eye on a young Marquis Capizucchi, an excellent match for a daughter of Prince Marcantonio Marescotti, of the Roman high aristocracy. And the Prince, in fact, willingly gives one of his daughters in marriage to him. But it is not Clarice. It is Ortensia, the youngest.
After that, Clarice becomes the scourge of the household, unbearable to everyone. Such a disappointment can indeed embitter anyone, but perhaps the accusations are also a little inflated to justify her father’s reaction, who in 1605 had her enter the monastery of San Bernardino in Viterbo, with the Poor Clares, where her sister Ginevra already was. Here she takes the name of Giacinta, but without becoming a nun: she chooses the state of a Franciscan tertiary, which does not involve strict cloistering. She lives in two well-furnished small rooms with her own belongings and participates in common activities. But she is not like the others. She feels it, they make her feel it: a bad way of living. For fifteen years she carried on like this: a life “of much vanity and foolishness in which I lived in sacred religion”. Her own words from later. There is a “later”, in fact. There is a profound inner transformation, after a serious illness of hers and some family deaths. For Sister Giacinta, twenty-four extraordinary and very difficult years begin, in total poverty. And of continuous penances, with harshness little understood today, but which reveal new and surprising energies. From the two refined rooms, she moves to a derelict cell to live in privation: but at the same time, from there, she performs a singular work of “reconquest”. People far from faith return to it through her work, and become her collaborators in helping the sick and poor. An aid that Giacinta the penitent wants to be systematic, regular, carried out by strongly motivated people. This mystic becomes an organizer of welfare institutions such as the one called the “Sacconi” (from the sack that the confreres wear in their service) which helps the poor, the sick and prisoners, and which will perpetuate until the 20th century. And like that of the Oblates of Mary, called to serve the elderly. In the monastery that saw her enter disappointed and resentful, Giacinta realizes herself with a totality never dreamed of, also as a stimulator of faith and a teacher: we see her, in fact, opposing Jansenism in her lands, with incisive impulses to love and adoration for the Eucharistic sacrament. Not many people know her personally. But immediately after her death, all of Viterbo rushes to the church where her body is exposed. And everyone takes away a piece of her habit, so that she will have to be dressed three times. In Viterbo she will remain forever, in the church of the Poor Clare monastery, destroyed by the 1940-45 war and rebuilt in 1959. Her canonization was celebrated by Pius VII in 1807.