Tradescantia virginiana, also known as Virginia spiderwort, belonging to Commelinaceae, is a rustic perennial plant, generally used in low-maintenance gardens. During the summer of 2019 plants grown in mixed planting borders and pots in several gardens located in the Biella province (northern Italy) showed extensive foliar disease. Sixty percent of about 100 plants grown in one garden were severely diseased. Early symptoms were small, light brown, necrotic spots with a reddish border, later reaching 10 mm diameter with an irregular shape. In some cases, the internal part of the necrotic areas dried with the appearance of holes. The disease progressed from the base to the apex of plants, and most of the leaves turned completely necrotic. For identification of the causal agent, symptomatic tissues were immersed in 1% sodium hypochlorite for 2 s, rinsed with sterile distilled water, and dried. Small fragments were excised from the margin of lesions and plated on potato dextrose agar (PDA) amended with 25 mg/liter of streptomycin sulfate. A single fungus with felty, white cream to gray colonies consistently developed. A 14-day-old culture of the isolate 19-29, selected among those collected as representative based on morphological characteristics grown on PDA at 21 to 23°C under alternating daylight and darkness (12 h photoperiod), produced black globose or subglobose pycnidia measuring 89 to 211 μm in diameter, with masses of hyaline, elliptical conidia, mainly nonseptate, measuring 8.9 to 15.3 × 5.6 to 7.9 (average 11.4 × 7.1) μm. On the basis of the morphological characteristics, the fungus was identified as Phoma sp. (Boerema et al. 2004). The internal transcribed spacer of rDNA was amplified using the primers ITS1/ITS4 (White et al. 1990) and then sequenced. BLAST analysis (Altschul et al. 1997) of a 488-bp segment of isolate 19-29 (GenBank accession no. MN526484) and a 541-bp segment of isolate 19-30 previously isolated in the same area (GenBank accession no. KJ443356.1) were identical to the sequence of Phoma commelinicola strain CBS100409 (GenBank accession no. GU237712). Pathogenicity tests were performed by spraying five T. virginiana plants grown in 3-liter pots with 1 × 10⁵ conidia/ml obtained from the 19-29 isolate, and the same number of healthy plants inoculated with sterile water served as controls. Plants were maintained in the garden at 18 to 25°C and covered with plastic bags for 10 days to maintain 90% relative humidity. The first foliar lesions, similar to those observed in the field, developed on leaves 10 days after inoculation, and after 30 days all inoculated plants were severely damaged. Control plants remained healthy. The pathogenicity test was carried out twice. The fungus reisolated with 100% frequency from leaf lesions of six samples obtained from the inoculated plants was identical in morphology to the isolate used for inoculation. P. commelinicola has been reported on Commelina nudiflora in Puerto Rico (Young 1915) and on Tradescantia sp. in New Zealand (Boerema et al. 2004). To our knowledge, this is the first report of the presence of P. commelinicola on T. virginiana in Italy and Europe (Farr and Rossman 2019). At present the economic importance of this disease is unknown, but it may become a more significant problem if the cultivation of Virginia spiderwort in gardens increases.