The patron saint of Campi Bisenzio is Blessed Teresa Maria of the Cross, born Teresa Manetti, celebrated on 23 April, the day of her death. She was born in 1846 in what was then the hamlet of San Martino, to Gaetano, a poultry seller, and Rosa Bigagli: the childhood of little «Bettina», as she was soon nicknamed by her family and fellow townspeople, was spent amid the financial hardship that followed her father's death, when she was only a few months old.
In 1904 the Carmelite Sisters of Saint Teresa, whom she founded, received approval from Pope Pius X, and in those same years the first foreign houses were opened, in Syria and Palestine. In 1908 Bettina was struck by an incurable illness that led to her death on 23 April 1910; at her passing she nevertheless saw fulfilled her wish for perpetual eucharistic adoration in the church built in Florence, and the sending of her sisters to Lebanon, the Holy Land and Brazil. She was buried in the convent of San Martino. The canonical process, opened shortly after her death, concluded on 19 October 1986, when Pope John Paul II proclaimed her blessed during a visit to Florence. Today the order she founded, familiarly called «delle Bettine», is present in Italy, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Lebanon and Israel; on 7 December 1999, following a popular petition that gathered thousands of signatures, Teresa Manetti was proclaimed patron of Campi Bisenzio.
