Luigia Poloni was born in Verona on January 26, 1802, the last of the twelve children of Gaetano Poloni, a grocer, and Margherita Biadego, and was baptised at the little church beside the Scaliger tombs. When her father died in 1822 she took over the running of the household and its accounts, brought up her nephews, nursed her relatives, and kept the family through hard years.
For more than thirty years her spiritual director was Don Carlo Steeb, a German convert priest of Verona who spent his life among the sick and the dying of the city's hospital and hospice. He was sure that the hospital needed women bound to it by vows, and he was sure Luigia was the one to gather them.
The cholera of 1836 decided her. She nursed the stricken through the epidemic, and the sick became her vocation. On November 1, 1840, with three companions, she moved into the Pio Ricovero, Verona's hospice for the destitute, to serve its inmates: this was the beginning of the Institute of the Sisters of Mercy. On September 10, 1848 she made her religious profession and took the name Vincenza Maria.
She wrote the Institute's first Rule in her own hand, and she wrote its spirit in one sentence: the poor are our masters, to be loved and served as Christ himself. The sisters went out to the hospital wards, to the hospice, to the city's abandoned old people and unmarried mothers, teaching the poorest women trades so that they could feed themselves.
She died on November 11, 1855, after forty days of illness with breast cancer, at fifty-three. She was buried in the Institute's common sepulchre among the sisters who had died before her, and her bones were so mingled with theirs that at the exhumation none could be told apart. She has no bodily relic; at her canonisation the relic carried up was the manuscript of her Rule.
The diocesan process opened at Verona in 1990. The cure of a sister of her own Institute was recognised by decree on December 17, 2007, and she was beatified in Verona on September 21, 2008 by Cardinal Angelo Amato. On January 27, 2025 Pope Francis approved a second miracle, and Pope Leo XIV canonised her on October 19, 2025, naming her in his homily with Carmen Rendiles among the 'charismatic founders'. The Sisters of Mercy still keep their mother house in Via Valverde, a few streets from where she was born.