Terence of Pesaro

Saint Terence (Terenzio) is the patron saint of the city of Pesaro in Italy. According to tradition, he was from Pannonia and fled to the Adriatic coast to escape the persecution of Decius (around 250 to 251). Our sources show him venerated as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church, with commemoration on 24 September; the Russian source says that he died on 24 September 247, which does not agree with 250 to 251 in the English source.

According to tradition, his body was thrown into a gorge near some hot springs (locally called the bad water, acqua mala), near Pesaro. The place of his martyrdom was considered the area called the Apsella di Montelabbate, near the abbey of San Tomaso in Foglia, where there are sulphurous springs called the Water of Saint Terence. An alternative tradition makes him the first bishop of Pesaro, a native of the city, not a Pannonian layman; the Russian source says that he performed his episcopal ministry there and that the reports about him come largely from a late passion, preserved in an ancient codex now lost, kept at the monastery of Fossombrone. Earlier images show him as an aging bishop; later ones depict him as a young man in military dress, with the palm of martyrdom in one hand and a model of the city in the other, thus among the military saints. So Giovanni Antonio Bellinzoni da Pesaro (about 1415 to 1477) paints him.

His body may have been buried by Bishop Florentius of Pesaro outside the city, close to Caprile, which ancient documents call the Valle di S. Terenzio. According to another tradition, his body was buried by a local woman named Theodosia. His relics were then moved to the basilica of San Decenzio (now the church of the central cemetery), before being moved in the sixth century by Bishop Felix of Pesaro to the recently built cathedral of Pesaro. Placed at first in a crypt, the relics were moved in 1447 by Giovanni Benedetti to a large altar, in a wooden urn on which Bellinzoni painted Terence. The urn is now at the Museo Civico, in Palazzo Toschi-⁠Mosca, and the relics themselves were moved to a new urn in a new chapel of the cathedral, inaugurated in 1909. As a soldier saint, Terence is held to have appeared twice in times of crisis; the second time, on 9 June 1793, when Pesaro was besieged by French troops: a horseman appeared on the walls of the city, accompanied by a woman dispensing munitions, and the vision so terrified the French that they abandoned the siege. In gratitude, Terence was officially proclaimed patron of the city on 20 March 1802. His most famous depiction in art is on a predella panel of Giovanni Bellini's Pesaro Altarpiece, the Coronation of the Virgin (about 1475 to 1480), where Terence, as the city's patron, holds a model of the Fortezza Costanzo.