In August 1517 Father Lorenzo, chaplain of Salzano in the flat country of the Veneto between Padua and Venice, was called urgently to bring the Viaticum to a dying parishioner at the western edge of the parish, between Zeminiana and Briana. The hour and the season ruled out the customary procession with lights and bell, so he set out with a single altar boy, carrying the Blessed Sacrament across the meadows along the Muson river that the people call the Cime.
Donkeys were grazing there. As the priest passed, the animals turned toward the Host, came up to him, and knelt. They rose and walked before him as an escort all the way to the sick man's house, knelt again at the door while he went in, and afterward accompanied him back to their pasture. The story was written down by the Jesuit Servant of God Simão Rodrigues, one of the first companions of St. Ignatius of Loyola, who stayed with Ignatius at the nearby episcopal castle of Stigliano in 1536 and examined the proceedings drawn up at the time. It was repeated by Orlandini in his History of the Society of Jesus (Bologna, 1615) and by the Bollandists, and the records of the Curia confirm Father Lorenzo as chaplain of Salzano in August 1517 under the pastor Don Francesco Artuso.
The parish church of San Bartolomeo Apostolo keeps the memory: a fresco of the miracle by Gian Maria Lepscky, and the relics and documents in the adjoining museum named for St. Pius X — for Giuseppe Sarto, the future pope, was archpriest of Salzano from 1867 to 1875 and preached the miracle to the people who still tell it. The story is one of the gentlest in the whole Eucharistic tradition: the beasts of the field recognizing, as Isaiah says the ox and the ass do, their Master.