Essays · by Frater Custos · 11-minute read

The bridge the devil did not build

At Borgo a Mozzano, on the Serchio, there is a medieval bridge that the devil is said to have built in a single night in exchange for the first soul to cross it. It is the legend that holds up the largest Halloween festival in Italy. No written trace of it is to be found before well into the 20th century.

The Ponte della Maddalena leaps the Serchio with one very tall main arch and three lesser arches stepping down to the right, and the asymmetry is the reason why it is one of the most reproduced images in Tuscany. It stands between Borgo a Mozzano and Diecimo, in the province of Lucca, at the mouth of the Media Valle. For some decades now everyone has called it the Ponte del Diavolo.

Even children know the legend. The master builder, in despair because the work would not come right, meets the devil; the devil offers to finish it in one night, and asks in exchange the soul of the first to cross. In the morning the bridge is standing. The master builder, repentant, confesses to the parish priest, and the priest suggests that he send an animal across first — a pig, a dog. The devil takes the beast and vanishes into the river, humiliated.

It is a fine story. The problem is where it is found written down.

The bridge, and its date

We know a fair amount about the structure, though less than what one reads. A first construction is placed in the 11th century, and the commissioning is attributed to Matilda of Canossa: an attribution repeated everywhere, which in the specialist literature nevertheless remains conjectural — the specialist publication that has examined it most recently calls her a «presumed patron, with no certain confirmation». It is not a document: it is a learned tradition.

The rebuilding that is spoken of with most confidence is the Castruccio one, placed between 1324 and 1327, under Castruccio Castracani. The name «della Maddalena» arrives late, from the 16th century, from an oratory with an image of the saint that stood by the abutment of the bridge. In 1581 Michel de Montaigne names it in the Journal de voyage; in 1670 the Republic of Lucca issues a decree for its preservation; in 1836 a flood of the Serchio damages it; at the beginning of the 20th century it is altered for the passage of the railway, and it is from there that the arrangement photographed today comes.

The legend, and the gap

The tale of the diabolical pact for the building of a bridge is not a Lucca story. It is a catalogued international tale type: in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther classification it is number 1191, The Dog on the Bridge. Fixed structure: pact, payment in souls, trick with an animal.

The comparative repertory most used for this type — the one edited by D. L. Ashliman at the University of Pittsburgh — collects seventeen European variants. It is worth looking at the dates of the sources, because they are the interesting thing:

All the northern European variants have a 19th-century source, collected by a folklorist with a first name and a surname. The Tuscan variant, in the same repertory, has as its source an article of tourist promotion from 2020. It is not a proof, but it is an indication that carries weight: it means that whoever compiled the repertory, looking for a source for Italy, found that one to be the oldest.

So I looked from the other side, in the Lucca collections. Idelfonso Nieri (Ponte a Moriano, 1853-1920) is the collector of the Lucchesia: Vocabolario lucchese of 1901, Cento racconti popolari lucchesi of 1906, plus Usanze tradizionali lucchesi and Superstizioni e pregiudizi lucchesi. In the preface he writes that in his book there is no word and no phrase «that is not used by my people», and he collected from servants, labourers, farmers. He is not a compiler: he is someone who went and listened. In the Cento racconti, as far as I have been able to read, the devil’s bridge is not there — there is a tale about the devil in the dish and a proverbial reference, and that is all. Giovanni Giannini, the other collector of the Lucca mountains, publishes songs (1887, 1889, 1902) and popular theatre (1895): an aetiological legend of a bridge, given the form of his work, would not have fitted there in any case.

The state of the matter, put precisely: there exists, at the present state of research, no 19th-century written attestation of the legend of the diabolical pact referred to the Ponte della Maddalena. The tale type is pan-European and abundantly documented elsewhere between 1816 and 1912. The Borgo version circulates in tourist sources with no apparatus. The burden of proof now lies with whoever asserts its antiquity: it is enough to produce an earlier text. None of the dozens of pages that tell it does so.

The festival: 1994, three friends, a table at the village club

Here, on the other hand, the documentation exists, and it is recent and clear. I begin with a correction: the festival is not from 1993, as is read almost everywhere. It is from 1994.

Four sources of differing weight say so, in agreement: the official site of the format, a press release from the press office of the Regional Council of Tuscany of May 2025, and above all the account of Stefano Nannizzi, one of the founders, in a local weekly: «The three of us met one evening in October 1994 at a table in the village club». The other two are Patrizio De Servi and Sergio Citti. And the series of editions adds up: 1994 the first, 2019 the twenty-sixth, 2020 cancelled because of Covid — «the first stop in 27 years» —, 2025 the thirty-first. Whoever writes 1993 is copying out a mistake.

The origin, by the admission of the protagonists themselves, is an importation. The local press writes that what set the thing going was «an inhabitant who had lived in New York», and that the idea was born «on the return from America». None of the founders, and none of the sources, claims a continuity with an earlier local tradition. I looked for any custom whatever of 31 October or of 1-2 November at Borgo a Mozzano earlier than 1994: I found no trace of one in any source, of any weight, including the organisers’ own materials, which would have every interest in citing it if it existed.

There is in fact a point of chronology worth setting out. The studies place the mass spread of Halloween in Italy in the mid-nineties. Borgo a Mozzano starts in 1994. That is: the festival does not precede the national wave, it inaugurates it together with it. It is not a village that had Halloween before the others: it is a village that took it up among the first, and did it better.

The numbers nobody has counted

«Fifteen thousand people» is the figure that goes around. Where does it come from? From an interview with the mayor, Patrizio Andreuccetti, who answers a regional daily in these very words: «At the last edition I would say around 15,000». It is an administrator’s off-the-cuff estimate, not a datum.

The notable thing is that the local paper closest to the facts says so itself: it speaks of «10,000 to 15,000 in attendance» and adds that «it is impossible to make a precise estimate». And it is true: since 2023 the event in the village has been free of charge, in a built-up area with no controlled entry points. No count exists and none can exist. Before, in 2019, admission was paid — ten euros full, six concessionary — and a figure, in theory, there would have been.

I also flag a recurring misunderstanding: the counter on the festival’s site showing tens of millions counts visits to the site, not people at the bridge. It is quoted as if it were the second thing.

As for the formula «Italian capital of Halloween»: it is not a title, it is not an award, it is not a trademark. It is the organiser’s self-description — «the first and largest Halloween Fest in Italy» — taken up word for word in the press release of the Regional Council of Tuscany, and then relaunched in the headlines of the newspapers. The institution, at that step, does not certify: it copies out the private party’s formula. And a comparative measure does not exist, because — see above — nobody counts.

What in the Lucchesia is documented instead

It would be ungenerous to stop here, because the Lucchesia has genuine ethnographic material — only it is not what goes on the posters.

The linchetto and the buffardello have, unlike the bridge, exactly what the bridge lacks: a collector, a date, informants. Nieri defines the buffardello in the Vocabolario of 1901 as «a sprite, a curious little devil, more or less like the linchetto». And above all Oscar Guidi, in Magia e folletti in Garfagnana (Pacini Fazzi, 2004), works on testimony collected in the field between 1984 and 1987 at Careggine, Castelnuovo, Fabbriche di Vallico, Gallicano, Molazzana, San Romano, Colognora di Pescaglia, Vagli Sotto, Vergemoli. That is a method: one says where, when, from whom.

The buffardello walks on the chest of the sleeper, pulls off the blankets, steals the wine, tangles the hair, sucks the milk from the cows; his hands were pierced by Saint John. The linchetto is mischievous rather than wicked, it sets upon wedding nights and old women, it plaits the tails of the animals. They are nocturnal and domestic creatures, bound to sleep and to the stable.

And they have no documented relationship with the dead, with souls, or with the November calendar. Every time they are seen coupled with Halloween — and it happens — it is a recent graft. As for lanterns made from vegetables or children’s begging rounds between 1 and 2 November, in the Lucchesia and in the Garfagnana I did not find few 19th-century attestations: I found exactly zero.

What this does not prove

It does not prove that the festival of Borgo a Mozzano is a fabrication, and that is not what I am saying. A festival born in 1994 from three friends and grown to fill a village of a thousand inhabitants is a remarkable fact, and a successful one: in thirty years it has done what a promotion body with ten times the budget does not do. It does not need to be ancient in order to be good.

Nor does it prove that the legend is false. An oral legend can live for centuries without anyone writing it down, and the silence of the papers is not proof of the silence of the people. What can be said is narrower: that the antiquity of that legend at Borgo a Mozzano is, as things stand, documented by nobody, and that whoever presents it as medieval is asserting something they are not in a position to sustain.

And there is a precise way of naming what has happened, which is not an accusation but a description. The anthropologist Fabio Mugnaini, who teaches at Siena and studies festive practice in Tuscany, devotes a chapter to the telling of the origins of the festival without a history: the mechanism by which a recent festival, once it works, builds itself backwards a past that justifies it. It is not cynicism, and it is almost always in good faith. It is how festivals work.

The Ponte della Maddalena is an extraordinary medieval structure that has stood for seven hundred years. The festival held around it is thirty years old and alive. They are two true things, and neither of the two needs the other. It is the piece that welds them together — the devil who is said to have built it in a single night — that has, of the whole business, the youngest documentation.