La Befana

Lazio · Tuscany · the Marche · Abruzzo · Central Apennines and the Adriatic
Roma, rione Sant’Eustachio e piazza Navona per la fiera; Firenze e la Lucchesia per le prime attestazioni della parola e per le befanate di questua — Val di Lima, Tereglio, Casabasciana, Coreglia Antelminelli, Ponte a Moriano; Marche e Abruzzo per la pasquella e i riti della vigilia. Per Umbria, Romagna ed Emilia la pasquella è attestata nella letteratura di settore, ma non ho aperto quelle raccolte.

La Befana — the old woman who on the night of 5 to 6 January comes down the chimney and leaves presents or charcoal for the children, and whose name is nothing but «Epifania» worn down by use

Variants and dialect names

Befana is Epifania worn down by use. The TLIO lemmatises befanìa and records the forms befane, befani, befania, befanìa, befanie, bifania; its etymological note says simply «from epifania», and its linguistic note explains the voicing of the initial labial by Rohlfs §162 and the retracted stress by the influence of Greek epiphàneia. The GDLI lemmatises befana «(formerly also beffano)»; the Treccani vocabolario gives «Lat. *epiphanĭa for epiphanīa». No theonym appears in any of the three.

The names of the rites come from the feast too: befanata, which the GDLI defines as the Tuscan dialect song of the evening of 5 January, and in the Marche the pasquella, from Pasqua Befanìa, a form attested in a Florentine document of 1286-90; in Trentino, according to the Enciclopedia Italiana, beghenate. The Venetian Vecia and Perchta of the German-speaking lands are not variants of the name but separate figures, treated elsewhere in this atlas.

What is told

On the night of 5 to 6 January an old woman enters the houses by the chimney breast and leaves presents for the good children, ashes and charcoal for the rest. The fullest description is Giggi Zanazzo’s Roman one of 1908: two stockings are hung from the breast, one with little pastries, dried figs, dried chestnuts, an orange and a gilded and silvered pine cone, the other with ashes and charcoal «for every time they have been bad»; the evening before, children were sent to bed early and fed little, so that they would leave part of supper for the Befana.

Before she is a giver she is an effigy. In the earliest literary attestations she is a figure of tow and rags put at the window on Epiphany day for people to mock; Berni compares his own housemaid to her, and «far la befana» means to make oneself small and disappear. Where the rite is collective it goes out into the street: teams of men and boys go from house to house singing the befanata or the pasquella, with button accordion, fiddle and guitar, asking for walnuts, chestnuts and wine; elsewhere the effigy is carried round on a cart and burnt in the square.

What it was forthe author’s reading

The night of Epiphany is a night of regulated exchange. The round transfers food from those who have to those who have less, but inside a script: the singers arrive, tell the Nativity and the journey of the Magi in stanzas, close with the greeting, the leave-taking and the request for a tip; the house gives walnuts, chestnuts, wine, a few coins; at the end the bag is emptied and everything divided into exact shares, so many walnuts and so many chestnuts each. At Lucca in 1893 those who found nothing on the morning of the sixth went round the more charitable neighbours and gathered a little here and a little there. It is redistribution that humiliates nobody, because nobody asks for himself: they ask for the Befana.

Towards children the function is calendar and discipline at once: reward and charcoal come once only, at the end of the twelve nights, from an outside figure who has watched all year. And the ugly old woman hung at the window, to be stoned or burnt, is how the community unloads the ending year onto a puppet of rags.

Where it is attested

The word comes before the figure, and its date is in the TLIO: the first vernacular attestation of befanìa is in the Florentine statutes of before 1284 («for all the pasque of the year, that is for Christmas, for Befanie, for Resurrexio»); then the Sienese statutes of the Additions 1298-1309, Domenico Lenzi’s Specchio umano of 1347, Villani, the Pisan statutes, the Venetian San Brendano. Citing the Glossario diplomatico toscano, the TLIO further records the spelling Bitfanie in a Latin Sienese charter of 1048 and befanias, ‘gifts made at Epiphany’, in an Aretine document of 1211, and a «Donna Befania» in a Sienese document of 1231-32. In the corpus of early Italian the personified old woman is absent: only the feast is there.

The figure appears in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Tuscany, and appears as an effigy. Pulci, Morgante XXII 126, «who played the mummy, or rather the befana»; Gl’ingannati of the Intronati, performed at Siena in 1531, names «the night of beffana»; Francesco Berni, who died on 26 May 1535, writes of his housemaid in the Sonetto della massara «On Befanìa day / I mean to put her at the window as a befana, / so that someone may shoot her with a crossbow» — verses printed only after his death, from the Sonetti del Bernia of Ferrara 1537 to il Lasca’s Giunti edition of 1548: the «1535» in circulation is the year the author died, not of a printing. The earliest description the GDLI records of the Befana coming down the chimney and telling the good from the bad is Paolo Minucci’s notes to the Malmantile.

The rite collected in the field: Giovanni Giannini, Le befanate del contado lucchese, in «Archivio per lo studio delle tradizioni popolari», XII (1893), pp. 91-122, describes the round village by village in the Val di Lima — Tereglio, Casabasciana, Coreglia Antelminelli, Ponte a Moriano — transcribes the stanzas and traces the songs back to the night office of Epiphany. Knisella Farsetti, Befanate del contado toscano, Florence 1900, publishes eight. For Rome, Zanazzo 1908, chapter 174. The oldest general survey is the «Befana» entry signed by Raffaele Corso in the Enciclopedia Italiana of 1930.

Caution

Grade A because the documentary chain holds from 1048 to the present and I followed it on the texts themselves: the TLIO for the first dated attestation, the Crusca’s digital GDLI for the literary attestations, Pitrè’s «Archivio» on archive.org for the round with villages and collector, Zanazzo for Rome, the Sovrintendenza Capitolina catalogue and the Istituto Luce archive for the fair and the Befana fascista, Normattiva for the laws. What is second-hand I say so: Manni 1766 I know from Giannini’s citation, Pitrè 1881 and Mannocchi 1921 from bibliographies, the notes to the Malmantile from the GDLI’s quotation. And I found no instrument establishing the «Befana fascista».

What does not hold. The Befana as a «pagan goddess» has no ancient source. The reading was born of nineteenth-century comparativism: De Gubernatis in 1878 writes that «our Befana» corresponds to Frau Holle and that she «personifies now the dark season… now the light one», while admitting that the name comes from Epiphany; in 1930 Corso summarises that scholars «trace the myth of the Befana back to pre-Christian magical traditions», citing Grimm, Usener and Frazer. That is a reading, not a document, and it has been repeated for a century and a half — including by institutional pages, which add Diana, Satìa and Abùndia and give no source: Satia and Abundia are not attested Roman goddesses. The link with Strenia is doubly weak: Treccani derives strenna from Latin strena, probably a Sabine word, naming no deity, and the strenae were gifts of the calends, not of the sixth. Deriving the name from Berchta is ruled out by phonology. On the stocking the opposite claim needs correcting too: it is not a recent invention, since Zanazzo describes it in 1908 and the Capitoline catalogue sees it hanging from the effigy in Roman prints of 1816-1821; what is recent is the ready-filled stocking. Of the legend of the old woman who refuses to follow the Magi I found no trace in any source I read.

The grade says how well the entry is documented, not how interesting it is. How the grades are assigned.