GERVASIO e PROTASIO, saints, martyrs. — They are commemorated in the Hieronymian Martyrology on 19 June, the day of their translation to the Ambrosian Basilica of Milan. Their bodies, however, had been discovered two days earlier in the basilica of SS. Nabore and Felice by St. Ambrose in 386, while the struggle between the holy bishop and the empress Giustina was raging. The discovery was recounted by the Saint himself in a letter to his sister Marcellina, and is attested by St. Augustine and by Paolino, deacon and biographer of St. Ambrose, who were present at the event. The memory of the two martyrs, however, had until that day been almost entirely obliterated in the Milanese Church, and at the time of the discovery only a few old people remembered having heard their names and having read the funerary inscription. The date of their martyrdom therefore remains uncertain.
Only between the end of the 5th century and the beginning of the 6th did a forger compose a Passio, inserting it into a pseudo-Ambrosian letter and attributing it to a certain Filippo, a contemporary of the martyrs, who was said to have arranged for their burial in his own house. According to this Passio, G. and P. were twin sons of the saints Vitale of Ravenna and Valeria of Milan. After the death of their parents, they sold all their possessions, distributed them among the poor, and shut themselves away in a small house, where they spent ten years praying and meditating. One day a certain Astasio passed through Milan, on his way to war against the Marcomanni; the two brothers were denounced to him, and, when interrogated and invited to sacrifice, they refused. They were therefore tortured, and while G. died beneath the scourges, P. was finally beheaded.