January 21 is the feast of St. Agnes, the Roman virgin-martyr of the late 3rd or early 4th century. The earliest testimony is that of Pope Damasus I (366-384), whose epigram on her martyrdom was carved above her tomb; St. Ambrose and Prudentius, by the end of the 4th century, had already elaborated the tradition. Agnes was a young girl of the Roman nobility, perhaps twelve or thirteen, who refused to marry the son of the prefect and was martyred for her consecration to Christ.
The Basilica of Sant'Agnese fuori le Mura, on the Via Nomentana in Rome, was built by Constantine over the catacomb where she was buried. The mosaic in the apse, among the oldest in Rome, shows her between two popes. The basilica holds her relics, and the adjacent catacomb is one of the most visited of the Roman underground cemeteries. The silver urn containing her skull, preserved in the adjoining church of Sant'Agnese in Agone, was a gift of Pope Leo XIII in 1901.
The lambs of St. Agnes — two white lambs blessed on January 21 at the basilica — are the source of the pallium worn by metropolitan archbishops. The lambs are raised by the Trappist nuns of the Abbey of Tre Fontane, blessed at Sant'Agnese, and their wool is woven by the Benedictine nuns of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere into the pallia conferred by the Pope on June 29, the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul. From Rome, where she died and is venerated, the feast of Agnes is one of the oldest in the calendar.
