SIMONE di TRENTO, saint, martyr. - A child of 20 months (according to others, two and a half years), son of a tanner from Trento, he disappeared on the evening of Holy Thursday (23 March) 1475 and was found dead, with horrible mutilations, on the following Sunday in a canal running beneath the house of one of the city’s leading Jews.
Public opinion and the trial immediately opened by the prince-bishop Giovanni Hinderbach attributed to the Jews the blame for the killing, allegedly committed for ritual purposes. Fourteen of them, following the trial and testimony extracted under torture, were executed; the others, by a law that remained in force until secularization, were banished from the Principality. For the little S., whom the people of Trento at once venerated as a martyr, the Holy See granted only in 1588 the liturgical cult and inscription in the Martirologio romano. Feast day: 24 March.