Essays · by Frater Custos · 10-minute read

The dead who bring the presents

In Sicily, until a few decades ago, on the morning of 2 November children searched the house for the gifts the dead had hidden during the night. This is the Italian tradition of the dead: and it bears no resemblance whatever to the one invoked when people say that we had Halloween already.

On the night between the first and 2 November the dead come out, enter the houses, and leave something for the children. They do not frighten: they bring presents. And they hide them, so that in the morning they have to be looked for — under the bed, inside a wardrobe, at the back of a drawer. Whoever has behaved badly finds, instead of the surprise, a grater, which the dead use to scrape their feet.

This is the Sicilian feast of the dead, and the reference document is Giuseppe Pitrè, Spettacoli e feste popolari siciliane, printed in Palermo by Pedone Lauriel in 1881, the twelfth volume of his Biblioteca delle tradizioni popolari siciliane. The accompanying array is the one that still fills the shop windows today: the ossa di morto, the painted pupi di zuccaru, the frutta martorana, the cannistru of first fruits, and the fair where one goes to buy it all.

It is a tradition in which the dead are familiar and benevolent. They do not come back to frighten: they come back because they are still part of the household. It is a difference of temperature worth keeping in mind for the whole of the rest of this essay.

The children’s questing, in Sardinia

In Sardinia the same date takes a different form: children go from house to house and ask on behalf of the dead. The names change from village to village — is animeddas, su mortu mortu, su prugadòriu, su peti coccone, li molti molti in Gallura, su pane ’e su tocu at Cuglieri — and one receives bread, sapa sweets, papassinus, walnuts, almonds, raisins. Sometimes, as a joke, coal.

The anthropologically interesting part is that the children act as intermediaries: they ask not for themselves but on behalf of the dead, exactly as the poor, gravediggers, bell-ringers and sacristans used to do, who in the same communities received offerings in exchange for prayers. And on the night between the first and the 2nd the table is left laid, so that the dead may find comfort in the smell of the foods they loved.

Naples, and a cult that does not belong to 2 November

In the Fontanelle cemetery, in the tufa quarries of the Sanità valley, there are some forty thousand remains: the dead of the plague of 1656, then the bones removed from the churches during the clearances of the French decade, then the cholera of the eighteen-thirties. In March 1872 the canon Gaetano Barbati had them rearranged and opened the ossuary to the public.

What arises there is the cult of the capuzzelle. One adopts an anonymous skull, cleans it, gives it a case, flowers, a lamp: this is the refrisco, the refreshment. The soul — a pezzentella, a beggar soul — appears in a dream, gives its name, and in exchange for the care grants favours, or the lottery numbers. If the favour comes, the skull receives better accommodation. If it does not, one changes skull. The devotees are in great majority women.

In 1969 cardinal Corrado Ursi, archbishop of Naples, judged that the devotion had degenerated into fetishism and prohibited it.

There is, however, something to be said, and it is almost a paradox. The Fontanelle cult was never a custom of 2 November: it was daily, continuous, an everyday matter. The link with that date is if anything subsequent to the prohibition, because among the few things the prohibition left standing was an annual procession, on 2 November. The tradition cited today as most ancient has, at that precise point, been shaped by an administrative act of 1969.

The beans, the Lemuria, and a jump of five months

The same explanation is repeated everywhere about the sweets of the dead: the fave dei morti come from Roman funeral rites. It is worth separating two assertions that usually travel together.

The first holds, and the sources are there. Ovid, in the Fasti, describes the Lemuria: the father of the family throws black beans behind his shoulders for the lemures, saying «these I throw; with these beans I redeem myself and mine» (V, 443). Pliny, in the Naturalis Historia, says that beans are used in funeral sacrifices because the souls of the dead are held to be in them. Diogenes Laertius gives the same reason for the Pythagorean prohibition. The ancient link bean-dead is real and citable.

The second does not hold. That the Italian sweet beans of November descend from those rites is not documented by any source: it is an inference of twentieth-century scholars, as plausible as one likes but never demonstrated. And there is a detail that popularisers never mention: the Lemuria fell on 9, 11 and 13 May. To arrive at 2 November one has to move five months, and nobody explains how.

The lumere, and where the conviction really comes from

And so we come to the thing one reads every October: that in Italy pumpkins and turnips were carved with a face and a candle inside long before Halloween arrived. We had them too. Regions, newspapers and social media pages have been repeating it for years.

I tried to trace the source, and the source is there. It is this.

In December 1998 the newspaper La Padania, together with Radio Padania Libera, published the result of a collection of oral testimony: reports from more than a hundred localities, from the Valle d’Aosta to Friuli and as far as Tuscany and the Canton Ticino, of lanterns made from hollowed-out vegetables and lit around the first of November. The local names collected are numerous and credible: lümere in Lombardy, Emilia and Piedmont, lumazze in the Polesine and in Romagna, teste da mort in the Biella area, mortesecche in the Lucca area. The study accompanying the collection is by Gilberto Oneto, in the Quaderni Padani.

That material was then taken up, years later, in institutional press releases as well — among them one from the Regione Veneto — which present it as an established fact without indicating any source.

Now: oral memory is real, and I have no reason to doubt that many of those people genuinely remembered the lanterns of their childhood. But as proof of an ancient custom that corpus has four problems, and all four must be stated.

First, the date of the collection. It was made in 1998, that is, when Halloween was already circulating in Italy. A collection of recollections made afterwards cannot, on its own, rule out that the recollection reorganised itself around a new model.

Second, the venue. It was conducted by a party press organ, within an explicit polemic between local tradition and American importation. This does not make any single testimony false: it makes an independent verification necessary, and there has been none.

Third, the absence of documents. None of the texts I have read cites a nineteenth-century source. Whoever conducted the collection declares explicitly that he confined himself to reporting what he had gathered. And the precise bibliographical reference of the study in the Quaderni Padani — number and year — I have not managed to find.

Fourth, the quotation that goes round and does not add up. The description of boys with hollowed-out pumpkins and small lamps at Chieti and at Ortucchio is often attributed to Antonio De Nino, Usi e costumi abruzzesi (1879). I have not been able to confirm it in the volumes I managed to read — the readings were truncated, so this is not a refutation. But there is a detail internal to the quotation itself: Ortucchio is tied to the eve of St Martin, 11 November. Whoever uses it to speak of the night of the dead moves the date by ten days without saying so.

Conclusion, on the documentation I have arrived at: there exists no Italian ethnographic attestation earlier than the twentieth century of vegetable lanterns for the dead. There exists a real body of twentieth-century oral memory, collected once only, in a partisan venue, and never subjected to verification. They are two different sentences, and the second does not license the first.

❦

What remains, and what I do not know

What struck me, setting this material out in order, is that the October polemic is built on the wrong ground.

People argue whether the pumpkin is ours or American. Meanwhile the documented Italian tradition — the one with Pitrè behind it, with the fairs, with the sweets that have a name in every region — is something else and lies elsewhere: it is the dead who come into the house and leave the presents for the children. It is older than the lumere as far as we know, it is better documented, and it is a good deal stranger than any pumpkin.

Whoever defends «our traditions» by citing the lanterns is defending the most fragile piece, and letting the solid one fall.

One question remains that I cannot answer, and I am not closing it. When did Halloween arrive in Italy? Everyone writes «in the nineties». I have not found a single dated and citable proof — a market figure, a survey, a press archive — in support of that sentence, which is universal in Italian popular writing and universally without a source. And I have found no study documenting whether Halloween really did replace the local customs, or whether those customs were already in retreat on their own account, like a good many other things of the peasant world.

Which, come to think of it, is the most instructive fact of all: of the cultural transformation that everyone comments on every year, nobody has kept the record.