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Updated: June 26, 2025
On Thursday, 29th, the day appointed for transporting the picture back to Custonaci, there was early Mass in the Matrice, where there was not nearly room for all the people, and after Mass a short sermon. The preacher contrasted the sadness of the present occasion with the joy of that happy day in 1893 when the Madonna had come to dwell among them, bringing the rain with her.
Coming out of the sunlight into this still, beautiful, holy place the chant sweet and sacred accompanying her steps, with the Cross repeated again and again in the heights of the domes, with the dear familiar form of the Mother Mary on every side lifting adoring eyes to the crowning figure of the Christ, while the saints who graciously leaned to her from their golden backgrounds in the great vaulted spaces above recalled the legends inseparably linked with their intimate friendly faces and brought back the atmosphere of her own Matrice her mother church this maiden of Murano felt suddenly at home.
and then a breathless silence fell, for the bark of the ministering priest of San Donato had taken the lead, the white-robed nuns of the Matrice grouped about him, chanting as they approached some ancient wedding canticles of benediction.
In a picture by Cola della Matrice, the Death of the Virgin is treated at once in a mystical and dramatic style. Enveloped in a dark blue mantle spangled with golden stars, she lies extended on a couch; St. Peter, in a splendid scarlet cope as bishop, reads the service; St. John, holding the palm, weeps bitterly.
Every few yards the procession stopped, partly to rest the bearers and partly to give the crowd an opportunity of seeing the picture. Every church that lay on the route was lighted up and not till long past midnight, when the picture had been taken into each one of them to pay a farewell visit, was it carried back to the Matrice.
Her sacred picture is normally in her sanctuary down at Custonaci, about 15 kilometres distant, but when any general calamity afflicts the district, it is brought up to the Matrice or Mother Church of the comune on Mount Eryx.
The light is better in the sanctuary than in the Matrice upon the Mountain, but this picture of the happy Mother with the Child at her breast holding three golden ears of corn did not thereby seem to gain as a work of art.
For in her reverie she was comforted by that vision of a legendary time when the Holy Mother had stood, beautiful, compassionate, and commanding, in this field of flaming scarlet lilies; when a great emperor had obeyed her bidding, and San Donato, the Duomo of Murano, had arisen as a refuge for the sorrowing. In tender language of the people it was the mother church "Matrice."
Beyond the bridge, which the ubiquitous Lion guards with menacing, uplifted paw, beyond the Piazzetta of San Pietro where the acacia trees are growing, down by the main canal, where the breath comes freer for it is broader than the one where the gondolas from the great houses of Venice gather and float lazily; past the line of low, whitewashed cottages bordering the narrow foot-path on either side, over the little wooden bridge that spans the lagoon, fifty feet across from bank to bank with its ugly traghetto at the farther end, a figure was often seen wending, with a child held in tender mother fashion, to the campo of the "Matrice," the mother church of San Donate.
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