Linchetto
Tuscany · The Po plain and the northern Apennines
Lucchesia, Versilia, Garfagnana
Linchetto — «A spirit not evil but mischievous» which acts at night: it uncovers sleepers, throws the sheets about, beats on the chest, plaits the tails of horses and cows inextricably, knocks at doors.
- Variants and dialect names
- Linchetto; nicknames Caccavecchia, Carcavecchia
- What is told
- «A spirit not evil but mischievous» which acts at night: it uncovers sleepers, throws the sheets about, beats on the chest, plaits the tails of horses and cows inextricably, knocks at doors.
- What it was forthe author’s reading
- It works its mischief above all on wedding nights: it is the cultural explanation of the anxiety and the sexual failure of the first night, externalised into a mischievous agent.
- Where it is attested
- Idelfonso Nieri, Vocabolario lucchese. Giovanni Giannini, collections from the late nineteenth century. Oscar Guidi, fieldwork 1984-1987 in Garfagnana.
- Caution
- The etymology from the Latin incubus, with the chain lincubetto → lincuetto → linchetto, is Nieri's proposal and is to be treated as a hypothesis: it does not appear in the standard etymological dictionaries and it coexists with Del Beccaro's reading, which sees in it a residue of the god Faunus. The latter is in its turn an author's hypothesis, not philology.
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