Nicholas spent the last thirty years of his life in the Augustinian priory at Tolentino in the Marche, and died there on September 10, 1305. He had been born at Sant'Angelo in Pontano around 1245, named for Nicholas of Myra after his parents made the pilgrimage to Bari to ask for a child. The Church keeps his memorial on the day of his death.
He preached in the streets and in the local dialect, worked among the poor of a town divided by the Guelph and Ghibelline factions, and was known for hearing confessions at length. He is the patron of the souls in purgatory: the tradition holds that he was granted a vision of a soul asking for Masses, and that he offered the Eucharist for the dead for a week afterward. The custom of the Augustinian pane di San Nicola — small loaves blessed on the feast and given to the sick — is attached to his own recovery after a vision of the Virgin told him to eat bread dipped in water.
He was the first member of the Augustinian order to be canonized, by Eugene IV in 1446, a hundred and forty-one years after his death. His arms were severed from the body in 1345 by a German lay brother attempting to carry relics away; they are preserved in the basilica, and the accounts of their bleeding are recorded in the canonization process.
The Cappellone di San Nicola in the basilica at Tolentino holds a complete fresco cycle of the early fourteenth century by a painter of the Rimini school, covering the walls and vault with the life of Christ and the life of the saint — one of the best-preserved interiors of its date in the Marche.
