ZENOBIO (ZANOBI), saint. — Bishop of Florence, between the end of the 4th century and the first decades of the 5th. Patron of the city; feast on 25 May.
Z. was still alive when the deacon Paolino wrote, in 422, the Vita s. Ambrosi (ch. 50: PL 14, 47), in which the Saint is explicitly mentioned. It does not appear that he already occupied the see of Florence in 393, the year in which s. Ambrogio consecrated the suburban church of S. Lorenzo in Florence. Buried in S. Lorenzo, s. Z. was transferred in the 9th century to the urban church of S. Reparata, now S. Maria del Fiore, where he now rests in the artistic bronze urn, the work of Lorenzo Ghiberti (1432–42). The lives of s. Z. are not worth considering, since they are not earlier than the 11th century; the first (BHL, 9014) was written by the archbishop Lorenzo of Amalfi (d. in 1049), while he was in exile in Florence; the second (ibid., 9015), attributed to the pseudo-Simplician, bishop of Milan, was compiled between the 11th and 14th centuries. The date of the erection of the column of s. Z. in Piazza S. Giovanni is uncertain; it commemorates the elm tree which, struck by the Saint’s coffin during the translation, is said to have flowered in the depths of winter (26 January), as the archbishop Lorenzo recounts («arbor quaedam», ch. 13); the present column, on whose shaft there is a bronze elm branch, dates from 1384.