B — partly documented

Monachicchio

Basilicata · Calabria · The Mezzogiorno
Inland Basilicata and northern Calabria; strong attestation from Aliano (province of Matera)

Monachicchio — a tiny sprite, cheerful and mischievous, with a red hood that is his absolute distinguishing feature.

The Monachicchio with the red hood, spirit of a child who died unbaptised, plays and makes mischief in a Lucanian house.

Variants and dialect names: Monachicchio, Munachicchio; Monacacìidde in the Bari area, Scazzamauridd in the Vulture-Melfese
What is told: A tiny sprite, cheerful and mischievous, with a red hood that is his absolute distinguishing feature. In the canonical Lucanian version he is the spirit of a child who died unbaptised. The only defence: to seize him by the hood — whoever tears it off him obtains a treasure.
What it was forthe author’s reading: The working through of perinatal grief in a society with extremely high infant mortality: the unbaptised child, excluded from the cemetery and from salvation, returns as a playful sprite instead of as a damned soul.
Where it is attested: Carlo Levi, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, 1945: describes the monachicchio as the spirit of an unbaptised child with a red hood. It is first-hand literary attestation from the Lucanian confinement of 1935-36, the most solid source for the Basilicata side.

Reality checkprevailing hypothesis

What has been established today.

The Lucanian monachicchio is, in the canonical version, the spirit of a child who died unbaptised, and behind it lies an extremely heavy demographic reality: until the early twentieth century infant mortality in the inland Mezzogiorno was well above 150 per thousand in the first year of life, with a substantial share of deaths in the hours or days following the birth, before baptism was possible. The theology of limbo denied these children heaven and burial in consecrated ground, leaving them in an intermediate condition. The figure of the child sprite with the red hood is the form that suspension takes in the tale: neither damned nor saved, mischievous but not evil.

Lucanian demological tradition; on the condition of the unbaptised see the literature on the limbus infantium and the Italian historical infant mortality data (ISTAT, historical series)

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

Entries that share the motif, the phenomenon behind it or the history of their collection — not the geography.

Monachicchio

In the same area

Related by theme