Description
St Aloysius Gonzaga Frame
St Aloysius Gonzaga (Italian: Luigi Gonzaga; 9 March 1568 – 21 June 1591) an Italian aristocrat. Who became a member of the Society of Jesus. While still a student at the Roman College. He died as a result of caring for the victims of a serious epidemic. He beatified in 1605 and canonized in 1726.
Gonzaga born the eldest of seven children, at his family’s castle in Castiglione delle Stiviere, between Brescia and Mantua in northern Italy in what was then part of the Duchy of Mantua, into the illustrious House of Gonzaga. “Aloysius” the Latin form of Aloysius de Gonzaga’s given name in Italian, Luigi. Gonzaga the son of Ferrante de Gonzaga (1544–1586), Marquis of Castiglione, and Donna Marta Tana di Santena, daughter of a baron of the Piedmontese Della Rovere family. His mother was a lady-in-waiting to Isabel, the wife of Philip II of Spain.
As the first-born son, in line to inherit his father’s title and status of Marquis. His father assumed that Gonzaga a soldier, as that the norm for sons of the aristocracy and the family often involved in the minor wars of the period. As early as age four, Luigi given a set of miniature guns and accompanied his father on training expeditions so that the boy might learn “the art of arms”. At age five, Gonzaga sent to a military camp to get started on his training. His father pleased to see his son marching around camp at the head of a platoon of soldiers. His mother and his tutor less pleased with the vocabulary he picked up there.
