She is born as daughter of the wealthy Dioscuros of Nikodamia (Catania in Sicily has also been named as being the hometown of her father).  Like Agatha, she is said to have averted an eruption of Mount Aetna from the city and is therefore particularly venerated there. She was kept in a tower (a special building with a baptismal font) there to protect her (from Christianity). 

Legends tell in detail of her beauty, her reasoning and her studies and how she is said to have asked her parents whether the gods had been human beings and why they were venerated instead of an immortal deity.  Origines, a wise-man from Alexandria, teaches and baptises her. She reveals to her father, who has returned from a journey, that she has become a Christian.  He wants to kill her, but she is able to flee.  However, the governor succeeds in capturing her, and her angered father finally has her beheaded. Her angered father is himself killed shortly thereafter by fire falling from heaven. 
 
From the fourteenth century on, she is one of the most popular and most frequently represented saints.  Illustrations show her wearing a crown and bearing the Communion cup with the Host raised above it, a steeple at her side: sword, palm bough and peacock feather may also be represented.
 
From the fifteenth century on, she is one of the fourteen helpers, who comfort the dying; her prayer for forgiveness of sins for all Christians was given to her by a voice from heaven.  She is called on in times of stormy weather or threat by fire; from the eighteenth century on she becomes the patron saint of miners, sextons, artillerymen, architects and fire brigades.