Anna Maria Gallo was born in the Quartieri Spagnoli (the Spanish Quarter) of Naples, the working-class district below the Vomero, to a poor lace-maker's family. Her father was an abusive alcoholic who routinely beat her for her piety and tried to force her to marry a wealthy young man — she resisted both for years. At twenty-six, in 1741, she was finally permitted to take the habit of the Franciscan tertiaries of the Alcantarine reform (the Spanish-Alcantarine branch of Franciscan tertiaries, brought to Naples in the late 17th century) and took the religious name Maria Francesca delle Cinque Piaghe (of the Five Wounds).
She lived for the remaining fifty years of her life in the small terraced house of the Quartieri Spagnoli where she had been born — neither in convent nor in formal religious community, but as an enclosed lay-religious in her family home, receiving spiritual direction from the Alcantarine fathers and acting as catechist for the women of the Spanish Quarter. From around 1745 — at thirty — she received the stigmata of the Five Wounds, with the bleeding visible on Fridays during Lent. Her superiors examined the phenomena over years and accepted them as genuine.
She was the principal popular saint of plebeian Naples through the second half of the 18th century — the focus of devotion for the artisan women of the Spanish Quarter, the families of the Naples sailors and ship-workers, the indigent destitute of the city. She died at the Quartieri Spagnoli house on October 6, 1791. Canonized 1867. Her small terraced house, preserved as a shrine, remains one of the most-visited popular Catholic devotional sites in modern Naples — particularly for women in difficult marriages.