The Weeping Madonna of Syracuse (Madonna delle Lacrime)

In 1953, Via degli Orti di San Giorgio was a working-class street in Syracuse. At number 11 lived newlyweds Angelo Iannuso, 27, a labourer, and Antonina Giusto, 20. Above their bed hung a mass-produced plaster plaque of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a wedding present from Angelo's sister Grazia Iannuso. Antonina was expecting her first child. She suffered from toxaemia of pregnancy, with convulsions and repeated loss of sight.

29 August 1953. About 3:00 a.m. Antonina had a seizure, lost consciousness and lost her sight completely. At 8:30 her sight came back. "I opened my eyes and stared at the image of the Madonna above the bedhead. To my great amazement I saw that the effigy was weeping." She called Grazia and her aunt Antonina Sgarlata. At first they thought she was hallucinating. Then they came close. They too saw tears running down the cheeks, some falling onto the headboard.

That evening Angelo came home to a crowd at his door. He fainted, fearing for his wife. The plaque was dry when he arrived. He cleared the room and waited alone. Within a few minutes, he said, new tears ran down the face.

A passer-by, office employee Sebastiano Di Pietro, watched "a tear that kept swelling in the tear-duct hollow of the right eye." It ran down the cheek toward the chin. He and those around him wept and sobbed. Others touched the tears and tasted the salt.

The crowds grew dizzyingly. Police commissioner Niccolò Samperisi could not disperse them. He took the plaque to the questura, with Angelo going along, and gave it back the same night. On 30 August it hung on the outside wall. Amateur film-maker Nicola Guarino filmed a weeping in about 300 frames. On 31 August it stood on a pedestal across the street. In all, at least 58 episodes were counted.

1 September. A medical commission appointed by the Archdiocese arrived with parish priest Fr. Giuseppe Bruno. It was chaired by Dr. Michele Cassola. Soldiers and police were in the house. The doctors dried the plaque with cotton wool and waited. It wept again for about 15 minutes. It was the last time.

They collected about 1 cc of liquid and compared it with real tears. Sodium and chloride. A pH of 6.9. The same blackish nodules under the microscope. On 9 September they reported it was "of analogous composition to human tear secretion." The back of the plaque was completely dry. Magnifying lenses found no pore in the glaze at the eyes. The sculptor and the manufacturer called it "exactly as it left the factory."

In December 1953 the bishops of Sicily declared the event authentic. In 1954 Pius XII acknowledged their declaration and asked: "Will people understand the mysterious language of those tears?"

In 1995 chemist Luigi Garlaschelli of CICAP made a glazed plaster figure filled with salt water weep through tiny nicks near the eyes. CICAP traced an identical plaque from the same maker, with a cavity behind the head. Garlaschelli has never examined the original, kept behind glass, but he questioned the 1953 tests and the film. Maurizio Magnani noted the plaque was never sealed in a case. Yet no one has ever been named or caught tampering with it.

The house is now the Casa del Pianto, a place of prayer. Nearby rises a basilica, dedicated by John Paul II on 6 November 1994. The tears and the cloths that dried them rest in a reliquary. Every 29 August, Syracuse remembers.