Gemma Galgani was born to a Lucca pharmacist's family — the fifth of eight children, with her mother dying of tuberculosis when Gemma was seven and her father dying of throat cancer when she was nineteen, leaving her destitute. She had wished from childhood to enter the Passionists (the order founded by Paul of the Cross, see his entry); the Passionist nuns of Lucca refused her admission on grounds of her recurring serious tuberculosis-like illness.
From June 8, 1899 (the feast of the Sacred Heart) — when she was twenty-one and apparently in the last weeks of fatal tuberculosis — she received progressively a series of mystical phenomena: the stigmata appearing every Thursday evening and disappearing every Saturday morning across the last four years of her life (witnessed and recorded under independent observation by her physician Dr. Pietro Pfanner and her Passionist spiritual director Father Germano Ruoppolo CP), the marks of the crown of thorns, sweats of blood at her side, ecstasies, and continuous visible interaction with her guardian angel that she described in extraordinary daily detail in her letters to Father Germano.
She was taken in by the Giannini family of Lucca, who supported her materially through her last years, and she made private religious vows as a Passionist tertiary in 1900. She died of progressed tuberculosis at the Giannini home on April 11, 1903 (Holy Saturday) at twenty-five. Father Germano published her Diary and Autobiography in 1907 — they became among the most-read modern Catholic mystical texts of the early 20th century. Canonized 1940 by Pius XII — the rapid canonization (37 years after her death) reflected the extensive contemporary medical-theological documentation of her stigmata.