Centuries ago, it was said that Benevento was a gathering place for the occult. Today, superstitions still run deep
Stepping off the train in the southern Italian city of Benevento is not a particularly haunting experience, in the sense that the air on a brisk October day yields nothing other than cloud cover and fog. That this is the so-called “city of witches,” the site where women from all over the country might have flown in the middle of the night to dance around a famous walnut tree and to learn, effectively, how to be a witch, is not immediately apparent.
Where the witchiness of Benevento, a city of over 55,000 with a Roman theater and Arch of Trajan from ancient times, may be most felt is in the traditions of its residents, many of whom still hold close these passed-down superstitions. Depending on whom you ask, a curse of the evil eye must still be warded off with a specific ritual involving oil and water and a traditional prayer. Leaving a broom at your door is a good way to ensure the local witches, known as the Janare, won’t sneak under the threshold—they’ll be too distracted counting the strands of straw. And if you wake to find that your horse’s mane has been braided, a Janara must have taken it for a late-night ride.
Even now, when Maria Scarinzi, an anthropologist and head of education programs at Janua, Benevento’s Museum of Witches, interviews older residents about their beliefs, she finds that they hesitate to share everything for fear of retribution.
“They still believe that if you name the Janara, she will come to your house at night and she will harm you in some way,” Scarinzi says. “They still believe that if I tell you that I know the formula for getting rid of maggots, you will think that I am a Janara and you’ll distance me from society.”
How Benevento became the city of witches
Some researchers argue that this southern Italian town, a little more than two hours by train from Rome, became known for its witches because of its unique political position. But to understand the root of the myth, we have to go back to 1428.
The hunting and persecution of so-called witches was a practice that began to take root in Italy in the late 1300s, supervised and carried out in many ways by the Catholic Church. By 1542, Pope Paul III had created the Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, which tasked the church with criminalizing those who would speak against the faith. It was an amorphous crime, because any misfortune to befall a person or town could be attributed to a witch—around 80 percent of the people charged with witchcraft in early-modern Europe were women. Academics estimate that 22,000 to 33,000 witchcraft trials took place in Italy, with very few of these ending in capital punishment. Witch hunting appeared to largely come to an end by the 18th century.
The first reference to Benevento as a place where witches gather dates to 1428. It comes from the transcriptions of the trial of Matteuccia di Francesco, a 40-year-old woman who was eventually sentenced to death and burned at the stake for witchcraft by the Franciscan Bernardino of Siena in the Umbrian town of Todi.
From Matteuccia, we receive the famous formula, or incantation, that has since become inextricably associated with Benevento: “Unguento, unguento / mandame a la noce de Benivento, / supra aqua et supra ad vento / et supra ad omne maltempo.” Translation: “Ointment, ointment/ send me to the walnut tree of Benevento/ over water and over wind/ and over all bad weather.” During the trial, Matteuccia confesses that she spreads a cream on herself and chants to be sent to the walnut tree of Benevento, which had demonic associations and was thought to be near the river Sabato.
“From that moment on, the inquisitors try to make the witches confess that they went to Benevento, because it becomes a sort of indictment,” says Paola Caruso, who has published books on the folklore of Benevento. “If they went to Benevento, then that means they’re witches.”
In fact, according to Caruso, after Matteuccia’s confession, nearly all the Italian witch trials of the 15th and 16th centuries reference, in some way, Benevento as a gathering place for witches. No records exist, however, of witch trials in Benevento itself, though this could be attributed to the World War II bombing of the city’s central cathedral that destroyed much of the ecclesiastical archives, Scarinzi says.
By 1640, local medical examiner Pietro Piperno penned his historical treatise on, among other things, the walnut tree of Benevento, explaining the origins of its supernatural powers. He claimed, according to Caruso, that it is not those from Benevento who participate in the late-night gathering of witches around the walnut tree—but people coming from elsewhere. In many ways, this only reinforced the link between Benevento and the witches.
Caruso’s research is built on the idea that Benevento became the “city of witches” because of its political isolation. Even when surrounded by the Romans, up until the third century B.C.E., the city once called Maleventum was ruled by the Samnites. It was eventually subsumed into the Romans’ dominion, but after the fall of the Empire, by the sixth century C.E., the Lombards arrived, establishing Spoleto in Umbria and Benevento as their two southern duchies. What made Benevento unique is that, despite its association with the Lombards, it managed to remain in large part independent from centralized control until the late 11th century C.E., when it was taken over by the papacy and largely stayed under papal control until becoming part of Italy in 1860. The fact that it had retained some sense of governing autonomy for so long sowed insecurity in the political leaders of the time.
“We must imagine Benevento as a very rich city, a papal city, an obligatory halfway point—you had to pass through Benevento,” Scarinzi says. “We have to imagine it also as a kind of island in what was the Kingdom of Naples—difficult to conquer with all this wealth. So how can I discredit someone? It’s what we still do today: I speak ill of that person.”
The targets of this abuse were generally local women known as healers, “almost women of science,” Scarinzi says, or practitioners of what would today be called herbal medicine. These were women who knew the medicinal value of herbs like St. John’s wort, lavender and dandelion, gleaned from information passed down to them through generations.
“The negativity around these women was linked to the fact that people were afraid,” Scarinzi says, “because they were women who had a power, which, in many cases, was medicine.”
The modern-day legacy
The Museum of Witches, located in the Palazzo Paolo V off the city’s pedestrian Corso Garibaldi, is a testament to how the customs survive in the daily lives of its residents.
For a couple of decades, anthropologists have been interviewing people about the history and customs of the larger province of Benevento. Part of this effort has been to talk with the elderly—mostly those 70 years and older—to preserve the superstitions and legends of the witches before they disappear. About 10 years ago, they had enough to open a museum.
“Our goal was to recount the figure of the Benevento witch—that is, who the Janara is—for the people of Benevento,” Scarinzi says. “What is this magical world today, for older people, more than anything else, who continue to perform certain practices and certain rituals?”
The museum opens with a short video punctuated by the voices of residents describing how the legend of the Janare has seeped into their way of life. Artifacts show the roots of rituals. A pair of small coffee cups tells the story of how a woman could entice the man of her dreams by serving a drop of her menstrual blood in his coffee.
“The belief was that, in the moment in which the woman made her proposal of love, the man had to, naturally, accept, otherwise he would die,” Scarinzi says. “It was the Janara who gave the blood and the object a power.”
A woman proposing rather than a man went against the customs of the time, but therein lay the power of the witch: She could rewrite the social order.
A 19th-century prayer handwritten by a young child to protect her from any potential enemies is on display. At the time, children would have donned amulets and charms to ward off evil. Another display explains how laundry hung outside to dry should be taken in by dusk for fear that evil spirits might be present after the setting of the sun.
The oral histories the museum has collected shed more light on the behaviors that have grown out of these beliefs. Scarinzi learned that some local women have never been to a hairdresser, concerned that their hair would be kept and used against them in a spell.
Keeping the legend alive
Outside of the customs and superstitions ingrained in the culture of Benevento, there’s a capitalist reason why the legend has survived: the Liquore Strega, founded in 1860 by Giuseppe Alberti, who opened his bar in the center of Benevento.
“He decided to name the product after the legend of the city where it was born,” says Kenia Palma, marketing manager for Strega Alberti, the company that produces the liquor.
Strega means “witch” in Italian.
It didn’t take long for Strega to become a symbol of Benevento—the marketing of the yellow-colored liqueur, made in part with saffron, juniper and mint and bearing a slightly sweet yet smooth taste, was indelibly linked to the city and its witches. The label bears an illustration of witches dancing around a walnut tree. Today, its store is the first thing you see when descending from the train station. Palma notes that, on bottles of the liqueur, the location is even written as “near the train station,” because Benevento has long been considered an important junction that connected north and south.
The Alberti family worked to make Liquore Strega a symbol of Italy itself. In the 1920s, the brand enlisted well-known Futurist artist Fortunato Depero to create stylized advertisements. After the war, Guido Alberti helped to start the country’s famous literary prize, Premio Strega, named in the brand’s honor.