After three Sundays of Christmas trees and decorations let’s skip to the other end of the Twelve Days of Christmas and take a trip to Italy.
Among over 170 seasonal gift-bringers around the world that I’ve researched, one of the most famous is la Befana of Italy.
This is an edited version of an essay I have written for my personal Christmas files about la Befana. It is one of many, more academically-based, pieces I have written on various Christmas characters following several years of research. As such it contains more information and sources than I would normally include on this blog. La Befana is one of those characters whose history is so complex and massive that cutting it down has been difficult, but I hope you find what follows is of interest. I’ve expanded information on various lgbt+ aspects of la Befana’s history. So settle down for a longer read than normal.
Today, la Befana is depicted as a witch or old hag. Her name has become synonymous with witches, but not the scary Hallowe’en type but as a kindly old woman.
There are several variations of the legend behind la Befana’s gift-bringing activities. They all date back several centuries. The most common version is that she was an old woman who lived in the Holy Land during the time of Christ’s birth. The Three Kings arrived one night, after being told that la Befana was her village’s best hostess. They told la Befana that they needed to rest overnight on their way to visit the baby Jesus and give him gifts. They invited la Befana to go with them the following morning, but she declined saying there was some housework she needed to do.
The following morning she waved the Three Kings off on their journey. But their mission prayed on her mind and she couldn’t concentrate on her housework, so she decided to go and join them. Gathering up some small gifts to give to the baby Jesus she headed out into the village. But she soon realised that the Kings didn’t tell her which direction they were going. La Befana walked through every town and village looking for the baby Jesus, hoping to give her gifts to Him. Eventually, exhaustion took its toll and she collapsed and died. The baby Jesus, in one of those mysterious events that often occur in legends, took pity on la Befana’s fate and decided that from then on her spirit would be His gift-giving representative in Italy. Today, la Befana leaves gifts for all children in the hope that one of them may be the baby Jesus.
But how did she become a gift-bringer specific to Italy? And what involvement did a gay poet have in her development?
The most generally accepted origin of La Befana’s name is that it comes from the Italian word “Epifania” (=Epiphany), which is a Christian festival celebrated on 6th January and commemorates the arrival of the Three Kings at the Nativity. “Epifania” ultimately derives from the Greek word “epifaneia”, meaning “manifestation, or appearance”. The history of Epiphany is long and complicated and I won’t go into all of it – except for one thing: it’s the original date chosen by Gnostics in the 2nd century as the one on which the birth of Christ was celebrated.
In 2018 I wrote about Christmas and the Gnostics. Basically, the Gnostics were various small sects of Christians spread around the eastern Roman Empire. They didn’t celebrate Christ’s death at Easter, but celebrated his birth instead. Christians didn’t celebrate birthdays, mainly because of high infant mortality rates – they preferred to remember their deaths (like modern memorials and individual burials). Gnostics believed that the world and its inhabitants were evil, and the birth of Christ was a manifestation of God’s goodness, hence they adopted the word “epihaneia” for a special day of prayer and worship to celebrate the event (the name Christmas for Christ’s birth was adopted by Western Roman Christians much later).
One of those eastern Gnostic sects were the Carpocratians in Egypt. They believed that if the world and its people were evil then procreative sex was bad and non-procreative sex (specifically with the same gender) would bring them salvation. Western Christians accused them of being promiscuous and of having gay orgies, but there’s nothing to indicate they were having any more sex than anyone else.
The Gnostics, including the Carpocratians, are believed to be the first to celebrate Christ’s birth on January 6th. When the Western Christian authorities in Rome realised that the eastern Gnostic worship of Christ’s birth was becoming too popular they decided that rather than ban celebrating Christ’s birth they decided to come up with their own date. Unlike the Gnostics, the Western Roman Church used various clues in the New Testament and traditional dates of Christ’s crucifixion to came up with December 25th. Even though the Gnostics eventually faded away, their date of January 6th for Christ’s birth still survives in some east African and central Asian denominations (Eastern Orthodox Christianity also celebrates Christmas Day on January 6th, but it has nothing to do with the Gnostics).
To complicate matters, Roman Christians decided to keep Epiphany as the celebration of the “manifestation” of Christ, the doctrine that Christ was revealed to the world as its Saviour through the arrival of the Three Kings, and this eventually led to many Roman churches, particularly those around the Mediterranean where the Gnostics had been most influential, adopting January 6th as a gift-giving day, They later moved it to St. Nicholas’s Eve, December 5th, and that’s another story on its own.
Italy is one of those Mediterranean regions who adopted Epiphany as their original gift-giving date. They called it Pasca Epiphania, Pasca in this sense means “feast”, a Christian term used for a “holy day”, a day of worship, prayer and commemoration of a specific person or event (ultimately derived from the proto-Indo-European word for “god”). Of course “holy day” is where our modern word “holiday” comes from. There’s so much more to say about the Italian Pasca Epiphania and its origins, but we must concentrate specifically on its link to la Befana.
In winter, and often around Epiphany time, many European nations held bonfires as a traditional celebration in winter. On these bonfires they burned effigies of an old woman, said to represent the old year (much like an old man often represents the Old Year today, though he isn’t burned – this can link us to Baby New Year, an image popularised by gay artist J. C. Leyendecker). This bonfire custom still survives in Italy, whether called Guibiana, Panevin (or Pan e vin), or several other names. In medieval Venice, where the bonfire festival was held near Epiphany, the effigy gradually acquired the name reflecting the date – Befana. The name quickly spread across the whole of Italy (much in the same way as the name of the 17th century terrorist Guy Fawkes, still burned on bonfires in England every November 5th, became misappropriated by the USA in the 19th century to mean “man” or “person”). So, the name Befana was just an Italian slang term for an effigy of an old woman, and was later applied to humans in the meaning of a witch or hag.
But why burn an effigy of an old woman in the first place? Well, it is believed that what was originally burned was a large log on which was painted a face. Sound familiar? It’s the most likely origin of the Christmas log, and the Spanish “pooping log”, the Tìo de Nadal which is burned the day after Christmas Day. So, even if some Christmas traditions in different parts of the world seem unconnected, there is a connection if you go back far enough. And why a woman? Well, those bonfires held in winter were also to celebrate the end of harvest. Most cultures had a female deity that presided over harvest, like the Greek goddess Demeter, so burning effigies of female deities represented the gratitude to the goddess of a fruitful harvest and the hope of a good one the next year (modern New Year celebrations are pretty much the same thing).
The first printed use of the word “befana” in the sense of an old woman occurred in 1535 in a poem called “Sonetto in descrizion dell’Arcivescovo di Firenze”, or “A Sonnet Describing the Archbishop of Florence”. It was written by Francesco Berni (c.1497-1536), a satirist and comic poet whose works often included coded sexual references to boys. The sonnet was a sarcastic dig at the archbishop and begins with the words “Chi vuol veder quantunque pò Natura / In far una fantastica befana”. Translated into English this reads “If you could see what Nature does / In making a fanciful witch”. Berni uses the word “befana” figuratively, using it to call the archbishop an ugly and disgusting old woman. He may even have been using it in the sense of a befana puppet. Perhaps both.
Francecso Berni was born in Florence into a well-connected family. In 1517 he went to live with a Catholic cardinal who was a distant cousin. It was in Rome that Berni began writing poetry. In 1523 the cardinal’s nephew “exiled” Berni to a monastery in Abruzzo near the Adriatic coast over some homosexual scandal. Why exiling Berni to a closed community of men would have removed him from any gay impulses is a mystery. As to the exact nature of the scandal there are no surviving details.
However, it is known that Francesco Berni was a member of an influential group that included other gay writers. His works were so distinctive in their satire and coded gay references that his style has been named after him – Bernesque poetry.
Perhaps the most obvious coded gay references Berni used are contained in private letters to his fellow gay friends. In the letters he asked friends to provide, and thanked them for sending him, “hams”, a slang term for buttocks (with their accompanying young men!), and “peaches”, a slang term for the penis. These “hams” and “peaches” were to be “eaten” himself, as he himself put it, or passed on to other friends.
But, let’s get back to la Befana. The first printed reference to the term befana being used to denote Epiphany occurs on a few years after Berni’s reference, in around 1541. It appears in a comedy play called “La Trinunzia” by Berni’s Florentine contemporary and fellow-writer of Bernesque poetry, (who has no known link to enjoying or passing around Berni’s “hams” and “peaches”), Agnolo Firenzuola (1493-1543). In his play a character says the line “Hannomel detto le pecore la notte di befana, che tutte favellano”. This translates into “Hannomel said the sheep on Epiphany night, that they all talk”. This echoes another popular medieval European legend that all animals could talk in human languages on Christmas night.
The use of Befana as the name of an old woman who give gifts at Epiphany, the use we are most familiar with today, comes in another comic poem, a heroic epic called “Il Malmantile Racquistato”, or “Malmantile Recaptured”. It was written by another Florentine writer, Lorenzo Lippi (1606-1665). The poem was published posthumously in 1676.
Lippi’s first reference says: “Le balie si servano della voce befana, per intendere una di quelle larve che nuocono a’bambini, come il bau ecc., e gli persuadono che ci sia la befana cattiva e la buona, e che venga nelle case per la via delcammino.” This translates into English as:” The nurses use the word befana to mean one of those masks that frighten children, like the woof, etc., and they persuade them that there is a bad Befana and a good one, and that she comes into the houses [to reward or punish] along the way.”
That’s the early development of Italy’s “female Santa”, la Befana. There’s so much more history covering her complete transformation into a popular Christmas character, which includes contributions from other Italian gay (or suspected gay) writers such as Giordano Bruno and Count Giacomo Leopardi, but we must leave it at that or we’ll be here until next Advent.
I’ll just conclude by mentioning that la Befana has influenced several other seasonal characters and traditions around the world, which is yet whole new essay in its own right. Briefly, the characters Babushka (Russia), La Vieja de Belen (Dominican Republic), and to some extent Mari Domingi (France), are all old woman with back-stories about hosting the Three Kings and searching for the Baby Jesus.
And that’s it for today, and for 2025. Next year will bring many changes, which you’ll learn about in due course. I want to give you all a BIG THANK YOU for reading my blog, and in particular for reaching the mile-stone of a million page views. I can’t express how humbled and honoured I am that so many people find what I write remotely interesting.
I’ll sign off by wishing you all a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and wish you all the best for the New Year.
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