Villana was born in 1332 to the noble Florentine Botti family. Raised in conventional Florentine bourgeois-aristocratic devotion, Villana was married at the age of 13 (1345) to the Florentine merchant Rosso di Piero Benintendi.
In her young married life, Villana undertook the conventional Florentine bourgeois-aristocratic worldly life — fashion, balls, courtly amusements — in deliberate rejection of her earlier childhood piety.
The classic Villana-de-Botti conversion narrative: examining herself in a mirror adorned with her Florentine bourgeois-aristocratic jewellery and fashions, Villana saw not her human face in the mirror but the face of a monstrous demon — the vision-mirror producing her immediate conversion.
Villana undertook the Dominican Third Order (Tertiary) vows and spent the remaining 15 years of her life (1346–1361) at the Botti palace in strict Dominican-Tertiary discipline — simultaneously fulfilling her marital duties to Rosso Benintendi.
She became famous during her final years for her mystical-ecstatic experiences and her pastoral ministry to the Florentine poor. She died at Florence on January 29, 1361 in the continuing Black Death epidemic (the second wave of the plague, 1360–1362).