The Marchioness Magdalene of Canossa was born in Verona of rich and noble family on March 1st 1774, in one of the grandest palaces of the city.

She was the third child of the Marquis Ottavio and Coutess Teresa Szluha.

She was destined for a more extraordinary mission which would lead her to abandon the comforts of wealth and nobility in order to dedicate herself to the humble and the abandoned.

Already in her early childhood years, she showed herself to be talented, sensitive and most affectionate. She experienced deprivation in the most desolating form.

Her childhood was unhappy. She was only five years old when her father met with a sudden death. Two years after, her mother left her to enter into a second marriage.

The five Canossian orphans were entrusted to a French governess whose initial burst of enthusiasm for Magdalene was gifted with an unusually keen intuition.

At 17, she attempted an experience of cloistered life with the Carmelites but there, she understood that life was not for her. She returned to her family where she took up the task of heading and guiding the household during a time of extreme difficulty. It was towards the end of the 1700s that Verona was occupied successively by the French and the Austrians and the Canossa Palace hosted famous generals and emperors.

Amidst the outburst of temporal glory, Magdalene withdrew herself gradually. Each day, was her union with God intensified, so did her heart and arms open to the poorer classes who were increasingly being exploited and ill-treated. She felt an urgent need to break down the dividing walls of her palace and help alleviate the ignorance, the moral and material poverty of the most abandoned and the poorest.

After recovering from a life-threatening small pox, Magdalen felt a calling to help the poor and the sick. She began her charitable works/ works of charity in 1808 in Verona with a few companions. On December 23, 1828, her charitiable organization Institue of the Daughters of Charity, was set up.

Magdalen died in Verona on April 10, 1835. She was beatified in Rome on December 8, 1941. Then she was canonized on Octopber 2, 1988 and became St. Magdalen of Canossa. Her feast day is on May 8.