Entirely the Wrong Witch

La Befana, Babbo Natale, and the shifting focus of Christmas traditions in Italy

It is around 9pm on the last day of October, All Hallow's Eve. Back home, in America, it is Halloween, and everywhere kids are looking forward to the end of the school day when they can dress up and hit the streets to fill pillowcases with candy begged from the neighbors.

Here in Venice, it is simply October 31, the day before the Feast of All Saints. In Italy, the time to play dress-up isn't for another four months and the moveable feast of Carnevale, that Fat Tuesday of partying before Ash Wednesday ushers in the 40 austere days of Lent.

So why is it that the pizzeria I just left is packed with babbling kids, their faces smeared with makeup, pointy hats on their heads and gauzy or silky capes tied at their necks? Why did the marble fountainhead on Campo Santa Maria Formosa have a gaggle of costumed youths sitting upon it, laughing and eating candy?

What, in short, the Hell is Halloween doing in the very capital of Carnevale?

(Before you get confused: Yes, this story really is about Christmas; Halloween is just the setup.)

Three Kinds of Martyrdom in the Trentino

Of Martin Luther, the Council of Trent, 19th century Irredentiste heroes, and a saintly death by slipper in the Trentino Alto-Adige region of Italy

The year was 1545. It was late in November, and the German preacher, frozen to the bone, had barely made it over the last mountain pass on his journey south. He stopped at a crossroads, and before him he saw a pretty Tyrolean city called Trent nestled in the valley at his feet.

He stood there for a few moments, contemplating what the coming ecclesiastical conference might hold. He wondered if church officials from Rome might finally be willing to hear him out, perhaps even to revoke the label of heresy hovering over the radical ideas he had nailed to that church door. For seemingly the thousandth time on this journey, he started going over the words he planned to use in order to orate the members of the Papal envoy around to his point of view.

As Martin stood there, lost in his deep thoughts, a figure appeared toiling up the hill from the town. It was a farmer's wife, returning from a moderately successful day at the market. She still had some fruit in her basket, so the reformer asked politely if he might buy some, adding a casual comment about how Trent must be in a tizzy with preparations for the Great Council as she handed him an apple and he slipped her a silver coin.

"You got that right, sir." Said the woman in that odd, thick, medieval dialect of German the locals spoke, her eyes sparkling at the sight of the silver.

"All the church dignitaries already arrived I suppose." Martin asked offhandedly, biting into the apple.

"Oh, I don't know about all that." She replied, slipping the coin into a fold in her layers of clothes. "I'll tell you one thing though: that Martin Luther fellow isn't there yet, and he better not show up, neither. I poked my head into the church of Santa Maria this morning and saw that they were getting ready for him. They were building a big bonfire in the center of the aisle, and had a pot of oil boiling off to one side." She cackled with glee. "Oh, yes, if that German blasphemer is stupid enough to come down here, he'll get what's coming to him!"

Though Luther may have been deft with a quill and handy with a hammer—and dead certain he was the one to reform the Catholic Church—he didn't trust his personal rapport with God enough to assume he'd miraculously been made fireproof as well. He thanked the woman, who trundled off down the side trail to hide the silver under the big rock in her back yard.

Martin took one more look at the pretty little city spread in its valley below him, tossed the apple core into the bushes, and turned around. He clambered back up toward the mountain pass, hoping he'd make it back to the Austrian side of the Tyrol before the first big snow shut down the Alps for the winter.

The Madonna of Tears

Modern miracles and ancient myths in Siracusa, Sicily

This is the story of the Madonna della Lacrime, the Madonna of Tears. A Siracusan family buys a little factory-made plaster plaque-relief of the Madonna back in 1953. They hang it on the wall.

The next morning the husband goes off to work, after which the gypsum Madonna image starts crying, at 8:30 a.m. on Aug 29, 1953. Wife calls husband. He comes home. They marvel at the thing, a bit scared, and try to figure out what to do.

Relatives they call start coming over to see it and confer.

Then neighbors start arriving to see the miraculous Madonna (that'll teach them to reveal secrets to nosy Sicilian relatives).

Then strangers start showing up at the door.

You can see where this is heading.

No Room in the Inn at the Center of the World

Making do while shaking up in the myth-soaked Sicilian city of Enna

Enna is a city one can see in just 95 minutes—at least, that's how long it took Jay and I to do the major sights (not that most were major...).

Admittedly, we did skip the medieval Norman Torre di Frederico II and it's surrounding park, but the thing was way out on the other end of Enna in the new town (the city is kind of V-shaped, splayed out along two ridges) and is completely swathed in scaffolding (Ionic, from what we could tell) and closed anyway.

Although our train pulled in around 2:20pm, there wasn't a bus up to the town proper until 3:10pm. And, as it turns out, Enna's bus station is way the heck over in the new town, not the old town where all of the sights (and the only hotel) cluster.

A night atop the volcano

Climbing Stromboli, a violently active volcano and the last in the line of Aeolian Islands off the coast of Sicily

The mountain had been rumbling all day, but it wasn't until the setting sun sent sparking streamers across the azure Tyrrhenian Sea surrounding us that Stromboli's fireworks truly began.

With a primal roar and a boom that shook the entire island, the smaller of the cones inside the crater below us exploded in fire, spewing tons of molten lava hundreds of feet into the air. Jay and I were too dumbstruck even to grope for our cameras.

As the red glow faded and the magma spattered back to earth like fat raindrops, I turned to my friend and we could both think of only one reaction: "Wow."

Pyrotechnics over for at least the next 20 minutes or so, I looked around the rim of the ancient crater. We stood on the lip of a large bowl, in the bottom of which snuggled Stromboli's trio of active cones gurgling, hissing, steaming, and growling in between eruptions.

At regular intervals along the rim were foot-high curved walls of stacked pumice stone--some just a wind-blocking curl, others spiraled like a seashell. "Well," I said, gesturing to the walls. "Let's pick out a shelter for the night."