Essays · by Frater Custos · 9-minute read

Who wrote the Tuscan tradition

Pan co’ santi, ossi di morto, fave dei morti, the ben d’i morti. The Tuscan customs of 2 November are recounted everywhere. I tried to trace who recorded them first, and the answer is embarrassing.

Every October the same list comes out. In Tuscany, on the day of the dead, one makes pan co’ santi — a sweet bread with pepper, raisins and walnuts, of Siena and the Maremma. One makes ossi di morto, dry biscuits that imitate bones. One makes seme dei morti. In certain villages the children went from house to house to ask for the ben d’i morti. The table was left laid.

These are assertions verifiable in principle: if a custom existed, somebody wrote it down. For Sicily there is Pitrè in 1881, with the edition and the volume. For Tuscany I went looking for the equivalent. I did not find it. This essay is the account of that search, and it serves as an example of what happens when one tries to follow a tradition backwards to the first person who put it in writing.

The chain of copying

Anyone searching for «dolci dei morti» in Italian ends up, in two or three clicks, on the same Wikipedia page. It is the node the whole network draws on: you meet it rewritten on cookery portals, travel magazines, the sites of local authorities, newspaper columns.

I went and read the notes. That entry rests on four notes, and they are four food blogs published between 2014 and 2023. For pan co’ santi the note refers to a post of 10 October 2014. For ossi di morto, to a recipe site. No note refers back to a historical recipe book, to a folklore collection, to an archival document, to a field survey.

This is not a criticism of Wikipedia, which declares its sources and allows anyone to go and look at them — something almost nobody does. It is an observation on the form of our information: a supply chain in which each link cites the previous one, and the first link is a cookery blog. The tradition exists as narrative, widely shared and repeated in good faith. As documentation, as things stand, it does not exist.

The clearest case is the «seme dei morti», which one reads of as referred to Tuscany. The fave dei morti — almond biscuits — are assigned by the same sources to Emilia-Romagna, to Lazio, to Lombardy, to the Marche, to Umbria: not to Tuscany. And the etymology that is always carried along with them, the one that makes them descend from the beans of the Roman Lemuria, is asserted everywhere and proved by nobody. In the other essay I have already explained why that jump does not hold: the Lemuria fall in May, five months away from here.

The one circumstantial testimony, and what it is worth

One thing I did find, and it is right to give it its weight — which is not zero and is not much.

A Tuscan local paper published in 2021 the recollection of the «ben di morti»: the questing that on 2 November took poor women and children from door to door, and in exchange eggs, chestnut flour, oil, dried broad beans, dried figs, and the distribution of a bowl of spelt with bread. It is a precise description, with the goods listed one by one, of the kind that is not invented.

Two clarifications, however, change a great deal. The first: the custom is remembered for Carrara, which is the Apuan area and the province of Massa-Carrara — not for the Versilia and not for central Tuscany. The second: the article cites no source. It is the author’s personal childhood memory, published eighty years after the facts.

As an indication it is precious: it tells a researcher where to go and look, and in which area. As proof it is worth nothing, for the same reason a recollection of my own is worth nothing: a testimony without a collection and without a date is not a document, it is a starting point.

The Versilia, where there is nothing

Of the Versilia one sometimes reads as of a land of autumn rites. I have searched: Versilian and Apuan folklore, Camaiore, Pietrasanta, Seravezza, Stazzema. No Versilian tradition of All Saints or of 2 November is to be found documented in accessible literature. The Museo del Lavoro e delle Tradizioni Popolari della Versilia Storica, at Seravezza, is the institution that could prove me wrong, and I have not managed to consult its materials: that is the telephone call to make.

What there is in the Versilia today on 31 October I have counted, and it is this: five events in two municipalities — a concert at the Capannina of Forte dei Marmi, two evenings at beach establishments, two in a nightclub at Viareggio, plus one party for children. The census is not mine: I took it from the booking portals that promote them, which are also the only existing sources. There is not a single source, of any weight, connecting all this to a local tradition. It is seasonal night-time entertainment on an imported format, and there is nothing wrong with that: it is simply that it is not folklore.

And an obvious thing has to be said that is occasionally needed: the Carnival of Viareggio is in February — first edition 1873 — and has no relation whatever to Halloween or to All Saints. The only point of contact I have found between the two things is rhetorical: a mayor of the area comparing his own Halloween festival to the Carnival of Viareggio in order to give it stature.

The date, which on the other hand is documented very well

The contrast is instructive. Of the popular customs we know almost nothing; of the liturgical date we know almost everything, because the Church wrote.

The commemoration of the dead is instituted by abbot Odilo of Cluny for the Cluniac monasteries, and from there it spreads: to Liège and to Besançon already in the eleventh century. At Milan bishop Olderico fixed it on 15 October, and it was Saint Charles Borromeo who moved it to 2 November. At Rome it appears only in the fourteenth century. The three masses each priest may celebrate on that day are a concession of Benedict XV, 1915: a century ago.

On the year of Odilo there is a discrepancy that must be reported rather than smoothed over. The Enciclopedia Italiana, in the entry drafted in 1931, gives 928. The current literature gives almost unanimously 998. 998 is the date accepted today, and the Treccani’s 928 is in all probability a misprint or a superseded dating — but until I have seen the primary edition I prefer to say that two authoritative sources do not agree.

There is a detail, in that entry of 1931, that is worth as much as a proof: it mentions no Italian popular custom connected with the occasion. An encyclopedia which in 1931 describes the commemoration of the dead in Italy and does not record the pane dei santi, the ossa di morto, the questing of the children. It is not demonstrative — a liturgical encyclopedia may legitimately ignore folklore — but it is one more silence to add to the others.

The book everyone cites, and almost everyone cites wrongly

At this point somebody will object, rightly, that there exists a serious book saying the opposite: Eraldo Baldini and Giuseppe Bellosi, Halloween. Nei giorni che i morti ritornano, Einaudi, 2006. The thesis is that Halloween is not a mere American importation, and that in the Italian area there existed until a few decades ago rites of welcome for the dead, bone-shaped sweets, questings by children, carved pumpkins, suppers and terrifying tales, «from the Alps to Sicily».

It is a real book, by two real scholars, and I have no standing to contest it — also because, I declare it, I have not read it: I know its thesis at second hand, and that is a limit of these lines.

What I can say concerns the use made of it. The thesis of Baldini and Bellosi is the existence of a European autumn ritual complex, of which Italy was part. It is not equivalent to the assertion that Halloween was born in Italy, and still less to the assertion that a specific practice is attested in a specific valley. And yet it is from there that there descends, deformed from step to step, a great part of the «we had Halloween already» rhetoric one reads today on commercial sites and in press releases. A book that says «a European ritual complex existed» gets cited to say «my village pumpkin is medieval». It is an error of reading, not a discovery, and it is repeated every October.

When Halloween really arrived

On the chronology, on the other hand, there exists a recent and collective study: Laura Bonato and Lia Zola (eds), Halloween. La festa delle zucche vuote, FrancoAngeli, 2020, with case studies on Calabria, Tuscany and Sardinia and an empirical base in a questionnaire of 2019. The picture that emerges: a return to Europe in the years after the Second World War, a diffusion in the nineties, and a taking root which over the last twenty years passes above all through the school. The Tuscan chapter is by Fabio Mugnaini, of the University of Siena, and concerns rural commemorative practices: it is the only academic treatment of our point in existence, and I have not managed to obtain it. It must be obtained.

To give a measure of today’s phenomenon, the figures I have found come from an analysis by a trade association taken up by the national press: more than 300 million euros of turnover in Italy in 2024, of which 30 million the pumpkin alone and more than 55 million the sweets in the month of October alone. In 2020, with the closures, they had collapsed to 177 million. They are estimates by an interested party — a traders’ association has an interest in the number being large — and they are to be read for what they are.

What remains

I am not saying that the Tuscans had no customs for the dead. It would be an absurd conclusion: almost everyone in Europe had them, and there is no reason why not here. The sweets exist, they are made, they are sold, and nobody invented them last week.

I am saying something smaller and more uncomfortable: that nobody wrote them down while they could still be seen, or that if somebody did, that text no longer circulates today, and therefore everything we can say about their antiquity is conjecture. Whoever asserts that pan co’ santi is medieval has no document: he has a habit.

The difference between the two things is not pedantry. A documented tradition withstands those who exploit it, because the document is there and can be gone to and read. A tradition merely asserted bends to any use: it is lengthened by a few centuries to sell it to tourists, shortened to deny it, moved from one region to another. It is the document that protects the tradition, not the affection one bears it.

And if anyone has at home a book, a parish priest’s notebook, a family recipe book with a date, attesting one of these customs before the twentieth century — write to me. I should be glad to have to rewrite this page.