Saint Marcellina was born around the year 330 into a Roman Christian family. Her father served as Praetorian prefect of Gaul. After the death of their parents, she took responsibility for the upbringing of her younger brothers, Ambrose and Satyrus. As the eldest in her family, she made it a point to pass to her younger brothers the “desire not to express their virtue, but to become truly virtuous.”
She devoted herself to the practice of piety and asceticism, and received the veil of consecrated virginity from Pope Liberius. She lived a life of great austerity, which Ambrose tried to persuade her to mitigate. According to tradition, she turned the family home into a church dedicated in Mary, which later became Sant’Ambrogio della Massima.
After Ambrose had become Bishop of Milan in 374, he summoned his sister, Saint Marcellina, and found in her a zealous assistant in fostering and extending the ascetic life among the maidens of Milan. Ambrose dedicated his work on virginity, written in 377, Libri III de virginibus ad Marcellinam to her.
Saint Marcellina survived her brother by a year, dying in 398. Honored as a saint, she was buried in the crypt under the altar of the Ambrosian Basilica in Milan.
