On the night of January 27–28, 1772, thieves broke into the church of San Pietro Apostolo at Patierno, then a village in the countryside north of Naples, and carried off the consecrated hosts from the tabernacle. For a month there was no trace of them. Then, on February 24, in the lands of the Duke of Grottolelle, strange lights were seen hovering over a dung heap at the edge of a field, and a dove was observed settling there. When the spot was dug out, the hosts were found buried beneath the manure — every one of them whole, clean, and intact. They were carried back to the parish church in procession, and a plaque still marks the place: "Qui, a piè di un letamaio" — here, at the foot of a dunghill.
The Archbishop's Vicar General, Monsignor Onorati, opened a diocesan trial that ran for two years, from 1772 to 1774, taking depositions from the witnesses of the lights and the finding. Among the witnesses were three of the most respected scientists of the day, including Dr. Domenico Cotugno of the Royal University of Naples, who examined the hosts and declared together that their intact preservation "cannot be explained with physical principles and surpasses the power of natural agents; therefore they must be considered miraculous." On August 29, 1774, the Curia of the Archbishop of Naples pronounced that the appearance of the lights and the preservation of the hosts "has been and is an authentic miracle operated by God, to illustrate more and more the truth of the Catholic dogma and increase the worship towards the Real Presence of Christ in the Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist." St. Alphonsus Liguori, then bishop of nearby Sant'Agata dei Goti, described the miracle in detail and used it to rekindle Eucharistic devotion among the people.
Two centuries later the Church renewed its witness. In 1967 Cardinal Corrado Ursi raised San Pietro Apostolo to a diocesan Eucharistic sanctuary, calling the event "a gift and a divine warning for the whole archdiocese" whose voice "must never weaken." In 1971 the diocese kept a Eucharistic Year in its memory, and in 1972 Professor Pietro De Franciscis, teacher of human physiology at the University of Naples, re-examined the evidence and confirmed the judgment of 1774.
Then, in 1978, unknown thieves broke into the church a second time and stole the reliquary containing the miraculous hosts of 1772. It has never been recovered. What remains at Patierno is the sanctuary, the plaque in the field, the painting of the young man discovering the luminous hosts under the stars, the trial records, and Cardinal Ursi's decree — the documented memory of a miracle whose physical relic was taken, as its hosts had once been, by thieves in the night.