ABSTRACT
A visit to the convent is a popular annual outing, for the core of the original fourteenth-century house where Francesca and the women who joined her lived still survives among the later structures. An upper room, used as a chapel, has its walls covered by a series of frescoes done in 1468 commemorating miracles and cures wrought by the saint during her life. People can buy packets of the ointment made - so it is said - according to a recipe used by Francesca. It is the protective and healing powers of the saint that are emphasized today in her cult, and these were certainly prominent in the fifteenth century when interest in Francesca first developed. Yet neither her healing capacities nor her protective abilities provide the full measure of the nature and power of her cult in late medieval Rome; nor can the modern, rather attenuated popular celebrations replicate the potent, emotional and contradictory spirituality of the Francescan world.
