The Befana Is Returning

In Italian popular culture, La Befana is a beloved crone who travels the night sky by broomstick on January 5, the eve of the Epiphany. Going from house to house, she descends each chimney to fill the stockings of well-behaved children with toys and candy, or with lumps of coal for those who have been naughty. Stooped, wizened, dressed in rags, often bespectacled and smiling behind an enormous nose, she is omnipresent during the Christmas season, and shops are filled with figurines, ornaments, trinkets, and treats bearing her image. Nowadays, social media and a popular film franchise further conflate and reinterpret La Befana, whose ancient roots have spawned myriad traditional expressions throughout Italy. Enter The Befana Is Returning: The Story of a Tuscan Festival, Steve Siporin's deeply researched and contextually expansive investigation into the history and rituals surrounding La Befana, to lead us like a guiding star through the commercial cacophony.Although she shares qualities with a certain notable folk character who travels down chimneys to deliver presents during the Christmas holidays, La Befana is distinctly associated with l'Epifania, the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6, a national holiday in Italy. One origin story explains how, having come across her cottage on their way to Bethlehem, the Magi invited La Befana to join their quest, but she was busy with housework and declined. She soon reconsidered and set out with a bag of gifts for the baby Jesus. She followed the same bright star but was unable to find the royal entourage, and instead delivered her presents to children she met along the way. Siporin recounts this legend, alongside other variants, to emphasize La Befana's role in inaugurating the festival season that extends from Christmas through May. He maps the complicated web of feast days and ritual practices with architectural precision, teasing out how each event corresponds with and complements the next.The Befana Is Returning is the product of longitudinal research, an offshoot of Siporin's work documenting the Jewish community in the town of Pitigliano in southwestern Tuscany, where he resided for extended stretches of time and forged enduring friendships with community members. He centers his inquiry on the Befanata, a robust performance ritual particular to this rural region, where squads of costumed neighbors representing La Befana, her husband, her daughter, and assorted attendants travel from house to house singing bawdy songs and demanding food. Alongside analyses of local music and foodways, Siporin investigates interconnected agricultural trends, political history, spiritual practices, and oral traditions. One of the most delightful features of the book is its autoethnographic subtext, as Siporin shares moments of family bonding when he, his wife, and his children experience the excitement of participating in the Befanata. The field notes he includes in an appendix are an added bonus, revealing the immediacy of his discoveries and observations.Like many Italian festa traditions, the Befanata emerges from a culture of poverty and hunger. Pitigliano sits on a hilltop overlooking the Maremma marshlands that border the Tyrrhenian Sea. Siporin details the rise of mezzadria, a feudal agricultural practice akin to sharecropping in which seasonal laborers from surrounding mountain villages farmed the swampy, malaria-infested fields. Isolated from their families and from one another on rural farms, workers developed hybrid Epiphany celebrations, and the Befanata provided warm social spaces to counter their loneliness. Poverty, which intensified during the lean months of winter, often necessitated begging for food. Other Carnevale feast days incorporate begging rituals, but Siporin stresses the importance of reciprocity in the Befanata, as—similar to mumming—squads provide songs and moments of revelry in exchange for food and wine. The Befanata thus renders performative the act of charity, relieving society's hungriest members from the indignity of having to ask.The “loving labor” (p. 87) of food preparation and consumption is the heart of the Befanata, and the book's centerpiece. Foodways scholars will appreciate Siporin's deep dives into food culture and themes of abbondanza (abundance) as it contrasts with desperate want. Noting the “astounding” preponderance of folktales and songs in which the “action turns on food and hunger” (p. 95), Siporin acknowledges the contradictions in a country where the fertility of the land diverges with the poverty of the people. The Befanata mirrors the Cuccagna—the mythic land of plenty—as the foods that are prepared and shared with befanotti (squads) are the same: locally produced sausages, fowl, bread, wine, cheese, dried fruits, nuts, and sweets. However, Cuccagna is imaginary, and the Befanata offers genuine sustenance to nourish body and soul.Music is traded for feasts of abbondanza, and La Befana has inspired many songs. Siporin peppers each chapter with song lyrics (in Italian with English translations) that speak to ever-evolving social, political, and religious circumstances. He compares song variants to highlight distinctive regional dialects and idiosyncrasies and argues that song structures have remained remarkably consistent for centuries, while leaving room for creative liberties as befanotti tailor lyrics to address local needs. Songs are so elemental to the Befanata, and Siporin so expertly analyzes the function of oral poetry in marking ritual occasions that readers might want access to audio files. Listening for melodic and textual variations in field recordings of songs sung in practice would allow for a more engaging experience.Perhaps most revelatory to folklife practitioners is the Befanata's decline and revival recounted in chapter 7. Siporin explains how the mezzadria system began to wane in the mid-twentieth century, and with it many of the customs that had sustained rural farmers. Then, when the government decided to cancel the Epiphany holiday in 1977, the Italian people fought vigorously to reinstate it; in 1986, they were successful. In the Pitigliano region, resistance inspired a passionate young folklorist to stage formal performances that effectively recovered the Befanata. The revival process reminds us that traditions are always in flux and their upkeep is a covenant that must be regularly affirmed by community members.So La Befana returns each year because people crave her continuity and the gifts she brings. As a celebration of local knowledge and creativity, a study in contrasts and a meditation on the transformative and mutable nature of folk customs, The Befana Is Returning offers a rich exploration of the historical, cultural, geographic, and social contexts that shape traditional practices and allow them to thrive. It is a beautiful, affecting book that embeds within “the story of a Tuscan festival” a model for the craft of folklore in all its rewarding complexity

Art · Visual arts · European Linguistics and Anthropology · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History