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Gregory the Great wrote of him that "he was a man of rare virtue". His teachings and holy life not only influenced the lives of his own flock, but brought to the faith many heretics and pagans. In Lucca this Celtic apostle is still honored under the name of St. Frediano. St.

On and on he ran until he came to the city gates of San Frediano, there to wait until he could slip through unnoticed when the gates were opened at the dawn of day. Then on again until Florence and the convent were left behind and the whole world lay before him.

A third example may be cited in a yet more beautiful and celebrated picture by Francia, now in the Church at San Frediano at Lucca.

On November 17th the seigniory assembled on a platform erected by the San Frediano gate; and numbers of young Florentine nobles went forth to meet the King, who made his state entry at the twenty-first hour of the day.

It was worth while to wait for such chances in a place where there was no one to see, and often in his restless wakefulness he came to watch here before daybreak; it might save him for one day the need of that silent begging which consisted in sitting on a church-step by the wayside out beyond the Porta San Frediano.

Overwhelmed by the disasters that befell the Empire, we hear something of her in the sixth century, when S. Frediano came from Ireland, from Galway, and after a sojourn in Rome became a hermit in the Monti Pisani, till in 565 John III made him Bishop of Lucca. It seems to have been about this time that Lucca began to be of importance, after the fall of the Lombard rule, governed by her own Dukes.

But it is not of S. Frediano we think in this dark and splendid place, though the stone of his miracle lies before us, but of little S. Zita, patron of housemaids, little S. Zita of Lucca, born in 1211. "Anziani di Santa Zita," the devil calls the elders of Lucca in the eighth circle of Hell; but in her day, indeed, she had no such fame as that.