Word: antonietta
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...shapeless, pudgy fingers of her right hand she held a bleeding heart limned in red and gold. She was exactly like hundreds of other foot-high, hollow, plaster Madonnas that the Sicilian factory sold for $3, and like many of them she was a wedding present-to Antonietta and Angelo lannuso of Syracuse. Soon after they got the present in the spring of 1953, the commotion began...
Dark, devout Antonietta, then 20, became pregnant and began to suffer agonizing pains, during which her sight became clouded, and she prayed fervently to the Madonna for deliverance. Then, she recalls, on the morning of Aug. 29, 1953, in the midst of one of these seizures, "I saw tears pouring down the Madonna's face. It was incredible. For a moment I thought I was mad. She was crying like a child. Then I began to shout, 'La Madonnina piange [The little Madonna is weeping...
...Tears Like Pearls. Antonietta's mother and sister-in-law thought she was hysterical, tried to calm her until they looked at the Madonna. "So plentiful were those tears," wrote a monk reporting the case, "that they spilled over into the right hand holding the heart...
...Antonietta's husband, a farm laborer and Communist sympathizer, was skeptical. For four days crowds flooded into Syracuse while, according to many accounts, the Madonna continued to weep. Said a doubter: "I took the statue from the wall and found the wall behind it dry. I unscrewed the statue from its base and thoroughly dried it. Then two tears, like pearls, began to appear in the eyes of the Madonna." The Syracuse police force added its weight to the evidence. When the figure was removed to headquarters, its tears were said to have wet the tunic of the policeman...
During his regime Adler has at times misfired: last year's Boris Godunov, for instance, was a murky failure. But how well Adler has done is amply demonstrated by the fact that last month he and his company casually shrugged off cancellations by Sopranos Maria Callas and Antonietta Stella, promptly went on to give San Francisco what may well be its most stimulating opera season to date...