Seven Florentine cloth merchants who left the city together and founded an order seven-handed.
They were seven notables of Florence, most of them cloth merchants and members of a Marian confraternity, in a city torn by the quarrels of Guelphs and Ghibellines. Around 1233 they withdrew beyond the walls, and in 1245 to Monte Senario some twenty kilometres north, to live as hermits. What they meant to flee, the crowd brought to them: disciples joined, and the hermitage became an order, the Servants of Mary, approved in 1304. The singularity lies in that sharing — the Church did not retain one founder and six companions, but seven founders, canonised together by Leo XIII in 1888. Alexis Falconieri, the only one whose name stayed familiar, was the last survivor: he refused the priesthood all his life, holding himself unworthy, and died around 1310, said to be a hundred years old.
Seven religious in black habits, kneeling together before the Virgin; often against hills, Monte Senario behind them.