Bernardino was born on September 8th1380 in Massa Marittima to the noble Sienese Albizzeschi family. Orphaned at a young age, he was initially raised by his aunt in Massa before moving to Siena, where he studied grammar, rhetoric, and canon law. Shortly after, around the age of 20, he joined the Compagnia dei Battuti della Beata Vergine at the Ospedale della Madonna della Scala in Siena, abandoning worldly life and organising assistance for the sick alongside together with some of his companions. At 22, he entered the Order of Friars Minor, fully embracing Franciscan practice in its strictest form and showing a strong inclination for hermitic life.
During this period, his readings were crucial—not only the Church Fathers but also the works of writers and thinkers who were, at least officially, banned or frowned upon, such as Jacopone da Todi, Ubertino da Casale, and Pietro di Giovanni Olivi. In his youth, he occasionally began preaching, limiting his activity to the Sienese and Amiata regions. After falling ill with the plague and spending three years in spiritual retreat in Pavia, he officially began his preaching mission in 1417, which took him from Liguria to Piedmont and Lombardy, ultimately making him famous. During these years, he refined an oratory technique that fully embraced traditional Franciscan preaching: after introducing the theme based on a selected biblical passage, his discourse was always simple and rich in references to concrete aspects of life, capturing reality in its immediacy. While traveling to the Kingdom of Naples, he died in L’Aquilaon May 20th 1444.
His contact with the rural world of Maremma and the Franciscan approach to communication taught Bernardino to preach in a way that could be understood, using expressions, images, and anecdotes that captured people’s attention. His sermons frequently employed agricultural metaphors to illustrate the birth and spread of sin in the human heart: “Have you ever seen a thistle in winter? It starts with a tiny little thorn, and little by little, it grows and hardens. The same happens with people who listen to and agree with divisions and factions.”
In general, his preaching reflected an understanding of natural phenomena acquired through sensory experience and the familiarity with manual labor—elements rooted in his Maremman origins. He often spoke of how, when arriving in a town, he could immediately sense both the good and the evil present there: “Whenever I come to a town, every good and every evil that happens there soon comes into my hands. Every fragrant thing, every stench—I come to know them, one way or another, not through confessions I hear, for in the past ten years, I have already learned much about this world.”
His logic combined moral evaluation, natural metaphors, and symbols from the world of labour: “Have you ever seen iron being welded to iron? It never fuses unless the two pieces are placed firmly together (…). The devil’s wicked tongue works the same way. Oh, blacksmith! Do you know that red earth you put on the iron? That’s what helps it stick. And what does that mean? That blood makes one bind to another.”
These origins were not only an inspiration for his preaching but also a source of personal loyalty. Bernardino refused the position of Bishop of Siena because he was aware of the conflicts between Siena and Grosseto. Yet, despite his immense fame, his simple origins and straightforward style often provoked hostility. In Rome, for example, he faced opposition from critics who deemed his discourse too popular, calling him “messer tristo e dottorato”—someone who “only half-understood but thought they understood everything”—or from “great scholars […] who sometimes make a straw weigh more than Mount Amiata itself.”
As Pietro Bargellini suggests, it was precisely his peripheral, provincial background that enabled Bernardino to understand and denounce the evils of the city with passion and severity. The usurer, in his words, was “a beast with long fangs gnawing at the bones of the poor,” while the miser “would gut Christ to make strings for his lute.” Parents who “raise good-for-nothing children, dressing them in fancy coats and long hair,” only to abandon them to the worst corruptors, were equally condemned.