The Clairvoyant
By: Gabriella Gage
Tags: True Story, Longform, Mystery Thriller, History, Mystery

1860. Tuscany.

Inside a ramshackle carpenter’s cottage, Assunta Orsini, 17, was confined to her bed. She wore a small, laced black cloth on her head. Thin and ashen, she looked years younger than her age and yet seemed drained of life. When the door opened on this day, Assunta sat upright in her bed, as if she had known someone was coming to see her.

A young married couple entered. The wife, Signora Cinelli, began to introduce herself, but then Assunta spoke.

“Come, Serafina Cinelli,” said Assunta.

Signora Cinelli, dumbstruck by the teenager, a complete stranger, uttering her name, took her husband by the arm. The door closed behind them.

“Get down on your knees!” shouted Assunta.

The Cinellis, frightened by the change in the young woman’s voice, did as she commanded. The name Assunta Orsini had been spreading throughout Tuscany for the last year as rapidly as the growing unrest and uprisings plaguing the disjointed Italian territories. People claimed Assunta was a clairvoyant with powers that went far beyond predicting the future.

On this occasion, Assunta determined the Cinellis needed an exorcism as quickly as possible. Typically, a Catholic priest would present himself to lead the sacramental rite. But there would be no priest today. The exorcism had already begun. And Assunta was in charge.

In this region and era, women were assigned the status of a minor for their whole lives, raised to invisibly perform household duties. Assunta had defied all expectations of what a young woman could be capable of, in the process drawing hordes of followers seeking help — and enemies set on destroying her.

Prophetess. Witch. Oracle. Devil. Those were some names people called Assunta Orsini. Rumors indicated she could tell your future, reveal your sins, contact the dead, and channel the voice of God himself.

Assunta — named for the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, her ascendence into heaven — had no formal education. An Italian thinker of the seventeenth century summed up the general attitude on women and education with the expression, “son capaci, ma non devono” — they are able, but they should not. Assunta could not read, but she would brush her fingers along the pages of a purportedly “magic” book, a copy of Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. A monk had given the devotional text to Assunta while her sister was ill at the hospital. “Before you open it,” the monk instructed her, “make the sign of the cross, and say to yourself: My Jesus, talk to me.”

Assunta would have this book handy, for example, when visited by a sailor’s wife from Viareggio whose husband had departed on a long voyage. She implored Assunta to tell her anything. When would he return home?

“My Jesus,” Assunta would say, “speak to me,” as she scanned the page, not to see the words in print, but rather for some sublime and unseen truth.

“Your husband is well,” she said to the wife. It must have been a relief. But then: “He died in God’s grace. His death was very good. He drowned. Before dying, he suffered so much, and prayed so much, that God forgave his sins and he is in Heaven now.” Assunta could be full of kindness, but could also be blunt — even harsh — when sharing what she believed God was revealing to her.

A woman surrendering her baby to a foundling home.

It was later verified that this fisherman had died at sea.

Equally brusque was Assunta’s revelation to a young mother who had given up her baby. When a woman gave birth out of wedlock, there were few options other than the orphanage or gettatelli, literally meaning the place for thrown-away children. Her act of desperation had left her heartbroken. Assunta, she hoped, could foresee her reunion with her son. When will we see each other again?

“He died,” replied Assunta flatly. The woman immediately fled to continue her search for the child only to discover that Assunta’s prophecy had come to fruition.

No one was hit harder by shock than Assunta’s family. Her stepmother, Carolina, was a severe woman who tended to punish her harshly, often humiliating and ridiculing her in public. Assunta’s nonna, on the other hand, was seemingly unrattled by the commotion around her granddaughter. The young woman’s father, Luigi, was caught unprepared for what many considered miraculous. He did not try to stop her, though she was barely recognizable to her own family at times.

When Assunta spoke about everyday matters, her language was described as “crude dialect, full of errors and vulgar idiocies.” But when delivering prophecies, she spoke in “a clear, correct, dignified, and serious” manner. Witnesses described it as “another person speaking through her mouth.” In her trances she reportedly could converse in French and Latin. She spouted catechismal philosophies and sustained theological disputes with concepts beyond her knowledge. After these bouts she would confess she had not understood the meaning of the words that she had spoken. Assunta seemed to obey “a mysterious, occult force that communicated words and ideas to her in an extraordinary and phenomenal way,” wrote one chronicler. Over time, she relied less and less on the devotional book, using other objects including rags, paper, stones, rocks and wood to channel secrets. As she grew more powerful, she would not need any totems.

In the eyes of society, the young woman, small and plain but considered attractive enough, should have been dreaming of marriage. But when 17-year-old Arturo Cempini showed up eager to see Assunta, he was no suitor. Arturo, the son of a government auditor, had other priorities; namely, the battles erupting over attempts to align the territories of the region into a unified Italy. Arturo wanted to peek into his future as a soldier, which could pave the way for other successes. Would his glory come to pass?

Assunta lowered her eyes, refocusing herself as if she were recalling a forgotten memory. Then she glared in Arturo’s direction. She described in vivid, repulsive detail a demon surrounded by 40 snakes. She believed these were Arturo’s constant, invisible companions that slithered around his body, waiting eagerly to drag him to Hell.

“You will not go to war.” She told him his death was imminent.

The news devastated the once cheerful boy and his family. His family assured him he was healthy and well, but he could not shake the girl’s prophecy. Within a few months, he started to cough, and then to “spill blood” from his lungs uncontrollably. Would her son heal? his mother asked Assunta. “He will heal perfectly,” Assunta said, seeming to reverse her initial prophecy. But often her declarations were framed in metaphorical or spiritual terms. Arturo gradually became sicker until he died only a few months later in September 1860. “God wanted him for Himself,” Assunta explained to his weeping mother.

Assunta’s knowledge was awe-inducing to those who reported being on the receiving end of it. It was also intimidating. Her harsh stepmother began to give her a much wider berth.

Once people heard about the young woman’s abilities, they came from all over Tuscany to see her. Even travelers from abroad, such as the English painter and Florentine literary figure Seymour Kirkup, heard about Assunta and went to test her prophetic abilities in person. In a letter to a friend in England, Kirkup insisted “the facts themselves are very positive” on Assunta, noting that some priests “treated her as a saint.” He judged the case “authentic.”

When Father Gentile Pucci, a priest based in the Quarto area, came across Assunta, he was intrigued. Pucci tended to be disheveled and a bit disorganized. He did not project a particularly intellectual or scholarly air, but he was open-minded and enthusiastic.

When the two met, Assunta claimed to be able to reveal the state of Father Pucci’s late mother. The dead woman’s words — pleas for her son to pray for her salvation — came directly from the teenager’s lips so uncannily that they drove the priest to tears. From this point on, Pucci was a frequent companion and even confessor to Assunta, listening to her secrets and absolving her of her sins.

Many from the church, however, had very different reactions, ranging from skeptical to furious. Belief in a lay person’s spiritual powers weakened public reliance on the Church, already being challenged by the political turmoil of the day. Accusations and explanations flew as clergy heard about Assunta. Maybe she was possessed by demons. Maybe she was insane. Maybe she was just a teenager who craved attention — and money. One theory posited that she was controlled by someone else through hypnotism, which would explain her ability to speak in languages she did not know.

The Convent of the Encounter (Convento dell’Incontro) in Florence, from which Assunta’s activities were monitored.

Still, to challenge her directly was a daunting prospect. Whenever someone tried to trick her with false stories or fake misfortunes to test her, Assunta ignored them or refused to answer their questions. Others tried to profit off of her apparent gifts, in the process testing her moral compass. Assunta’s own brother tried to solicit the winning lottery numbers from her. The Papal State sanctioned a public lottery and, drew winning numbers daily. Assunta refused the request, knowing that to do so would be stealing from the church and God Himself.

No one had been more skeptical of Assunta than Brother Orazio, a local Franciscan monk. But then Assunta revealed the details of a private conversation Orazio had the day prior, when a man speaking to the monk blasphemed the pope. When Assunta repeated the harsh, blasphemous words back to Orazio — words she had no way of knowing — Orazio became an instant believer.

Father Pucci, her biggest advocate among the clergy, gave her a certificate to continue her visits with those who sought her visions, contingent on her not discussing matters or prophecies related to the government and current political upheavals.

But as Assunta’s popularity soared, the local monastery’s head Franciscan, Father Guardiano, instructed the monks not to confer with the girl. The Florentine government banned all visitors to the Orsini household. The attempted suppression only made the public all the more determined to reach Assunta.

When the Cinellis, the desperate married couple, came to Assunta’s modest house for help, they obeyed her command to kneel before her and begin the process of an exorcism. Assunta sprang to the floor and reached for an olive branch that had been blessed by a priest. She dunked the branch in a dish of holy water and sprinkled the couple, flicking it so it fell like raindrops against their skin.

Signor Cinelli recoiled at the touch of the holy water while his wife tried to restrain him. This visit was a last ditch effort to save the man’s life. An inexplicable darkness had overtaken him after he witnessed the early deaths of his two young sons. According to the bereft family, it was something beyond grief that had overtaken him — it was evil.

Doctors had been confused and then terrified. Attendants at Saint Lucia Hospital would later testify to a priest that Signor Cinelli exhibited inhuman strength when they had tried to sedate him. Each day, more than the last, he was “showing himself to be a madman [who] tried to grab, bite, tear, anyone who approached him,” as a priest recorded.

Clergy at the couple’s local parish had also examined Signor Cinelli. Witnesses recorded signs associated with demonic possession: an aversion to holy objects and a supernatural ability to distinguish between plain water and holy water, the latter inducing a violent reaction upon contact. Parish priests swore that the man was able to utter words in Latin, a language beyond his simple dialect — in a voice not his own, not unlike Assunta herself — a possible sign of speaking in tongues. When he went into his “frenzies,” six grown men were unable to restrain him.

Now the humble teenager faced him alone. It was a standoff, not with the grieving man, but with the malicious force she believed was possessing him.

“Damned spirit,” shouted Assunta, in a voice later described by those who heard it as supernatural. “I command you this in the name of God, leave this body, that is not yours: it is Jesus, Mary, and the Guardian Angel’s.”

Assunta had been on the other side of an exorcism before. Priests had insisted on trying to exorcise Assunta but each time gave up, finding no evidence of demons. This was her first attempt at conducting one herself. If she did possess powers from God, as so many believed, maybe she could use it to expel demonic control from this poor man.

She continued: “Leave this soul, that is not yours! Leave, and return to the place of desperation, to which God has condemned you.”

The man contorted, recoiling like a serpent to a mongoose at the touch of the blessed water and the petite young woman wielding it.

“No, I don’t want to leave,” came the reply, “I don’t want to leave… I want to be here, in spite of you… greedy, so greedy… no, you don’t have to have this soul, that is mine!”

Deep into her battle with whatever power seemed to control Signor Cinelli, Assunta recited the Liturgy of the Mass. She lit an altar of candles in front of the images of the cross, the Blessed Virgin Mary and the saints that covered nearly every inch of her walls. She used these blessed relics to hold the holy water she threw at the stricken man. The man cowered and blenched, writhing around on the floor. His threats grew more violent.

“Ugly little monkey, be careful, if you don’t stop, I am getting on top of you,” he growled at Assunta.

Assunta continued her blessings, though this large man could easily overtake her — or at any moment the authorities might burst into the house. A young woman was expected to bow down to the power of men, to shrink into obedience. But she braved it all, crying out: “You will not be able… I am not afraid… God, Mary, the Guardian Angel defend me.”

The man’s body contorted and convulsed violently. Assunta’s chants grew louder. The man’s head would later be described as becoming gruesomely deformed, his throat swollen and chest bulging forward like a frog’s. For those well-versed in demonology, these were potential clues to the demon’s identity. Baal, according to legend, had been a deity before falling from grace and taking his place as a king of demons, holding command over 66 legions — with as many as 6,000 demonic soldiers in each. The hoarse-voiced royal demon was said to have a variety of appearances, with the sixteenth century demonology text Pseudomonarchia Daemonum reporting that King Baal could appear with the head of a toad, cat, and human simultaneously.

Signor Cinelli wheezed furiously, stretching his gaping mouth wider and wider. At the sight of this, Assunta pounced on top of him, forcing the contents of a glass of holy water into the gaping mouth before forcing it closed with her hands.

She then stepped back.

His body reacted with ruinous shock, wiggling “as if it were a ball of yarn.” The volume of his throat increased while his eyes opened wide. “It seemed,” one chronicle recorded, “that from one moment to another he should burst, as if he should succumb to an unknown, oppressive weight.”

The man gave a horrendous bellow before passing out, seeming to be dead or near-death.

When he awoke, he seemed reborn. Assunta gave him a holy medal to wear around his neck and instructed him to never take it off. She warned him to confess all of his sins to God, recite prayers daily, sprinkle holy water around his room and drink sips of it from time to time.

She opened the door to her chamber.

“Evil demon!” Assunta called out. “So you left that soul that you wanted? So I was able to cast you out?”

Archbishop of Florence, Giovacchino Limberti, circa 1857.

The family would credit her for years with saving them, but Assunta’s own life still hung in the balance, now more than ever.

As Signor Cinelli recovered and his wife marveled, Assunta reported hearing the lurking demon, possibly King Baal himself, continue to address her. “Ugly little monkey, now you are happy, that you have made me lose that soul? I will never, ever leave you.”

Assunta’s exorcism crossed lines into dangerous territory that provoked enemies from all sides.

She broke restrictions imposed by both the government and the church on her household. The Catholic Church, already under threat from the newly unifying Italy, now had an upstart, unsanctioned layperson — a teenage girl, no less — performing one of the most sacred and secretive rites out of a shack. After only a year, Assunta had already been credited by the public with hundreds of miracoli, an alarming incursion into the church’s dominion. Father Pucci’s well-meaning certificate of permission to Assunta could only give her cover for so long.

Hostility turned into an outright campaign against Assunta and her family. Government operatives turned the tiny Orsini home inside out looking for any illegal funds they might have collected without taxation or state approval. As the patriarch of the family, Luigi Orsini faced the brunt of the harassment. At one point, the family found Luigi dazed after being roughed up by the gendarmi, the military police tasked with squashing internal enemies throughout the kingdoms. “It’s my own fault,” Assunta lamented. The weight of the world seemed to fall on her shoulders.

Meanwhile, Assunta’s devoted followers lined up outside her door — sometimes 25 to 30 carriages waited outside at a time. In addition to Catholics, Jews and Protestants also came to visit the young woman, sparking further controversy among church observers. The onslaught of visitors demanded that she “perform” even at times when she warned that she did not see anything. She would sometimes throw out guesses to appease the crowds. At those times, some were quick to turn on her as a false prophet. The routine gradually debilitated Assunta.

Priests from surrounding towns and villages forbade their penitents from consulting Assunta. They chastised those who did. One priest said of his peers: “they sought out jealousies, lies, persecutions and harassments against her.” When priests visited her to try to discredit her, Assunta greeted them respectfully. But when put to the test, she never held back from revealing their personal sins, embarrassing them and accumulating enemies in the process.

The ecclesiastical curia, a powerful council of clergy, summoned her. The Archbishop of Florence, Giovacchino Limberti, personally interrogated Assunta behind closed doors. Limberti, 39, had an intense stare and a stern presence. He was an intellectual armed with a knife-sharp memory. But the ambitious Limberti was considered a disappointment by many colleagues and rivals, too indecisive for tumultuous times. He disliked trouble and scandal, and rather than solving problems he had a reputation for brushing them under the rug.

Assunta did not waver in defending herself when questioned. Then came a commanding voice from Assunta — the kind of voice her believers had heard many times that seemed to come from the spirit world. “Believe in this simple, crude girl,” the voice coming from the young woman urged the curia. “Believe her. It’s not her that speaks: it is I who reveal myself through her mouth. Be certain that I have given her so much light and strength… I have chosen her as my wife since the first Communion. No one will go against the efficacy of my word, until I can convert souls, not even the ecclesiastical authority. Not anyone will impede the virtue of my word.” With jaws dropping at Assunta’s declaration, questioning came to a halt.

The voice’s allusion to a spiritual marriage “since the first Communion” suggested Assunta was empowered directly by Jesus. For her disciples, this would have confirmed Assunta’s powers and status.

Statue depicting Baal (also called Molech) as displayed at the Roman Colosseum.

Father Pucci continued his dedication to and his firm belief in Assunta. As her de facto confessor, he had become the only person to know her secrets, a risky spot to be in. Assunta told Pucci that she had urgent visions to communicate to Pope Pius IX about the Catholic Church’s precarious position in the growingly secularist, unifying Italy. She dictated the letter in Latin — which, by all accounts, she should not have been able to do. She warned the pope that he and the Church were under imminent threat. The revolutionaries would drive him from Rome for a time, but he would eventually return to where “God had placed him.” She entrusted the missive to Pucci. Though his actions could have put him at further risk, Pucci submitted the letter to the proper channels to reach the Vatican. Assunta was sure the Holy Father would respond.

But her letter went unanswered. This time her predictive powers seemed to fail, and at the worst possible moment.

Father Pucci, keeping a low profile, gathered intelligence directly from the church that could help him protect Assunta. Whispers had spread that the church was contemplating forcing Assunta from her home and confining her to a convent for the rest of her life. A panicked Pucci reached Assunta and warned her that she was in grave danger. The priest instructed her to immediately burn the document he had given her that granted limited permission to share her prophecies. Assunta understood. The priest fled from his now-ostracized parishioner.

In the last days of November 1860, the gendarmi arrested Luigi Orsini under suspicion of fraud. Father Pucci was also charged as “an aid to this transgression.” The walls were closing in. After eight days, Luigi was released. He went to his daughter, asking for what may have been her most important prediction yet.

“People talk about us everywhere and are against us,” Luigi lamented. “Tell me, when will these persecutions end?”

“Daddy, be patient,” said Assunta. “Jesus tells me that by the middle of the month everything will be over.”

For weeks, the courts summoned Assunta’s acquaintances to testify about her conduct. All of the boys from her father’s carpentry workshop had been called to appear. Questioned by such an august panel of investigators, some of the witnesses could be intimidated into implying wrongdoings. It seemed only a matter of time before authorities came for Assunta herself.

When that time arrived, a messenger of the court found her alone in a church, practicing her daily devotions. There was much for her to pray about right now. She called upon the spiritual forces she channeled every day in her visions. If help were coming from above, there was no time to lose. The messenger interrupted, delivering a court summons ordering Assunta to appear immediately before the Tribunale di prima Istanza, the preliminary judicial body for civil cases in Florence.

Darkness loomed in the sky on the morning of her appointment. A downpour began. Assunta journeyed out into the storm. Together with her elderly nonna — the only one of her family willing to brave the crowds and the courts after months of torment — they walked the two-hour journey through the hills on the ancient stone path and the flooded dirt roads. Soaking wet and hungry, Assunta arrived full of fear.

She entered the courtroom where Auditor Girolamo Gori, the investigating judge, presided over the proceedings. Gori was both a judge of her guilt and the chief inquisitor who questioned witnesses. The questions, based on the evidence collected by the gendarmi, came like rapid-fire, with insinuations of fraud, deception, and charlatanry. Did she take money from visitors without paying taxes? Did she knowingly deceive people, and if not, how did she come to know the secrets of past, present, and future?

Oddly, the authorities were armed with extensive inside knowledge about her and the Orsini family. Someone from within their close circle clearly had leaked to authorities. Sensible suspects included Carolina, Assunta’s stepmother, whose control over Assunta had been undermined by the young woman’s activities and her celebrity. Then there was Assunta’s brother, for whom she had refused to exploit her gifts to manipulate the lottery.

In addition to answering the questions, Assunta presented the certificate signed by Father Pucci. Wise beyond her years, she had disregarded the priest’s advice to destroy the document, and in doing so had saved the priest’s neck. Because the certificate specified that she should only discuss religious matters and not government issues, she successfully proved that Pucci had not defied government orders.

After three hours of inquisition, Gori would be tasked with deciding whether to acquit Assunta or commit her for a full criminal trial before the state.

For the moment, Assunta was free. Exhausted, she stumbled out into the flooded, mud-caked streets. Someone had spread word of her visit to the court, leading to an angry mob waiting outside to greet her. That same unknown adversary “had persuaded the mob of urchins and idlers to stalk her,” wrote one priest.

The crowd of angry young men verbally attacked her “bestially” in the street, circling around her with revolting, obscene chants. Not since Assunta’s exorcism of Signor Cinelli had she heard such curses cast against her. The Baal-like demon that reportedly had mocked her that day had promised it would not go quietly: I will never, ever leave you. Today, the young woman’s strength faded, and those who believed in the intervention of a sinister demon such as Baal could see his dark handiwork.

“Fool! Lush! Crazy! Sorceress! Possessed!”

Members of the crowd spit out epithets toward Assunta before they began with their more vulgar counterparts. Assunta clutched her nonna and tried to navigate past the men, but the crowd followed closely, tormenting them at every step. They brutally grabbed the women with outstretched hands while Assunta struggled to break free.

The women barely escaped but the damage was already done. “The fact is that the innocent girl was so shaken with fear,” came one later report, “that her circulation stopped… little by little she got sick.” An acute fever took hold of Assunta and she was confined to her bed, falling in and out of consciousness.

It was natural to expect Father Gentile Pucci, her greatest ally in the Church, to be at her bedside. But he was nowhere to be found, as he was possibly in danger himself if the authorities or angry mob got ahold of him. For now, though, the main concern was Assunta, not just her physical health but also her spiritual well-being. A priest administered her last Holy Communion, the beginnings of the Last Rites in the Catholic Church. Assunta tossed and turned, still haunted by the words of the unruly mobs, but at the moment of receiving the Eucharist, those who watched by her bedside said they saw her revive for a moment.

“Oh! what light! What splendor! What beautiful things I saw!” Assunta declared. “Open… open… now yes… now yes! Tonight I heard a voice that told me: Tomorrow they will believe you dead — but then you will revive yourself.”

Assunta indeed became unresponsive, then would wake up. On December 17, 1860, after three days in and out of consciousness, Assunta Orsini died at the age of 17. Her prediction of her troubles ending in the middle of that month had come to pass — but in the most devastating way possible for her father. He had been told a miracle had unfolded in his humble home, and now his daughter was gone and his family irretrievably broken.

For three days, the Orsini family allowed crowds to visit the body of the “blessed virgin,” only increasing her influence in death. No sooner had she died than people competed for souvenirs from her corpse and modest possessions, now considered relics of a clairvoyant and miracle worker. People cut strands of hair from her corpse, and handed them out to her devoted followers to “preserve it as a precious memory.”

No witnesses at the improvised shrine reported seeing Father Pucci, her spiritual confidante. As it turned out, he was not being held against his will. Pucci had reason to stay away because he had been the chief witness against Assunta. He had secretly shared with the government details of her activities, visitors, and possessions. Pucci — not Assunta’s embittered stepmother or brother — had been the source of all the officials’ inside information.

Pucci, in over his head, likely had bowed to the mounting threats against him, rather than setting out with the intention to betray Assunta, who for her part had gone out of her way to clear Pucci’s name in court. But by trying to save himself, ironically he ensured his life continued to be in danger from Assunta’s fanatical followers for the foreseeable future. To them, Pucci had committed treason against a saint.

It took more than a year for the verdict from those hearings that had facilitated Assunta’s death to surface publicly:

Hearing the Report of Auditore Girolamo Gori, Investigating Judge

Verdict: It is expected that the trial is full of proof, that the young girl of 17 years, Assunta Orsini, is believed, and deemed superiorly inspired to answer about the things related to the souls of the living, and of the deceased, and full this proof because, and she herself in her constituents asserts it, and supports it, and all the Witnesses heard in the trial trust in her as those, who had responses from her on the state in particular of the salvation or not of the souls of their dead….

There is no place to proceed further, neither against Assunta Orsini nor against Father Gentile Pucci for the charges that were brought against them above.

Thus decreed the fifteen December One thousand eight hundred and sixty.

The verdict dismissed all charges and even tacitly supported her ability to pursue her prophetic work. That verdict was issued two days before Assunta Orsini died — though neither she nor her family had even known.

As for accusations that Assunta or her family had monetarily profited from her powers, the only evidence that could be produced were two small pieces of wax gifted by one of her visitors. The finding undercut theories that Assunta had been part of some scam for profit; nor could skeptics convincingly point to coincidence or trickery to explain even a fraction of the predictions and private knowledge attributed to Assunta.

One of Father Pucci’s fellow priests, Father Giovanni Pierini, was initially dismissive when asked to investigate Assunta’s story. Pierini, 30, who was also a journalist, interviewed approximately 100 witnesses who claimed Assunta had performed miracles using her clairvoyance. Pierini was only able to disprove a handful of accounts, and to his surprise many inquiries seemed to produce iron-clad evidence of Assunta’s powers. He now believed there was more to this young woman, an “angel of goodness,” than he had thought, and that her enemies had certainly thought, too. Pierini reasoned that Assunta had been a vessel for someone else, for good, evil, or some other supernatural authority that remained to be seen.

To Pierini, the mob outside the court had been deployed as “scapegoats” by even more sinister forces that needed Assunta’s powers stopped. Suspects lurked everywhere with motives to turn the mob loose: the archbishop with a shaky reputation who tended to cover up disturbances; the once-adoring Father Pucci who may have felt the need to get rid of Assunta to conceal his treachery from her; a follower dissatisfied with Assunta’s prophecies or her ability to reveal private sins. For the believers, of course, a possible culprit was the demonic Baal — with legions of devils at his command — that had attached itself to her seeking to stop her powers. The British expat Seymour Kirkup, who’d met Assunta and knew people involved with the case, noted cryptically, “They killed the poor girl among them.” Pierini compiled crucial information related to Assunta’s story. Truly*Adventurous acquired one of the last remaining copies of Peirini’s documentation known to be extant, and this may well be the only narrative of Assunta’s case in more than a century and a half.

Assunta Orsini was never canonized as a saint, but Pope Pius IX did in fact receive her letter and read her prophecies with great interest. Her premonitions would later come to pass when Pope Pius IX was exiled from Rome by the unifying armies and the future of the church hung in the balance but was ultimately allowed to reclaim this location in the new Italy. These prophecies were included in a well-known 1864 Catholic collection of major prophecies regarding the “upheavals of the kingdoms of the world.” Though her name would fade into obscurity, buried by the powerful men who closed ranks against her, a bit of her voice lives on thanks to her prophecies.

Author’s Note: Special thanks to Julie M. Allen for help with translations from Italian.

Gabriella Gage is a nonfiction writer and journalist from Somerville, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe and The Globe and Mail, and she is a former James Merrill House Fellow.

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