ADRIANO di NICOMEDIA, saint, martyr. — According to the legendary Passio, A. is said to have converted as a result of the courageous attitude, during torture, of 23 Christians, victims of the Diocletian persecution, and to have been put to death with them. His wife Natalia, who was present at the martyrdom, is said to have buried him at Byzantium. The Greeks venerate him on 26 August, whereas the Martyrologium Hieronymianum commemorates him on 4 March. Pope Honorius (625–38) dedicated a church to him in the Roman Forum, adapting for this purpose the hall of the senatorial Curia. This church, called S. Hadriani in tribus fatis (because of the nearby group of the three Fates), was erected as a diaconia by Adrian I (772–95). A constitutum, attributed by the Liber Pontificalis (ed. L. Duchesne, I, p. 376) to Pope Sergius I (687–701), declares that the church of S. Adriano was to serve as the meeting and departure point for the litanic procession on the feasts of Mary Most Holy: the Hypapante, the Annunciation, the Assumption, and the Nativity. The commemoration of S. Adriano on 8 September, recorded in certain manuscripts of the Martyrologium Hieronymianum, in the Gregorian Sacramentary, and in the Gelasian Sacramentary of the eighth century, has not yet been explained; in any case, it is certain that the emphasis placed on the translation of the saint’s relics to Rome is nothing but an invention of the martyrologist Ado. Probably the feast of 8 September originated in the commemoration made of the saint on that day, on the occasion of the litanic procession that departed from his church.
ed. C. Cecchelli, Rome 1942, pp. 202–203, 294–95; C. Huelsen, Le Chiese di Roma nel Medioevo, Florence 1927, pp. 260–61; R. Krautheimer, Corpus basilicarum christianarum Roman, I, Vatican City 1937, p. 1. A. Pietro Frutaz