Leggende e Credenze delle Alpi Piemontesi:Storie di Demoni e di Santi, di Despoti e di Amanti, di Belve e di Spiriti
by Enrico Bertone
I bought this book on a whim, while browsing in a bookshop at Torre Pellice, a town nestled in the ancient Waldensian valleys of Piedmont.
It was the last day of the year, in the darkening hours of the late afternoon. The shop was warm and welcoming but, outside, a clammy sort of cold was descending. The cobbled streets were nearly deserted. The few locals still around were huddled in cafes, drinking treacly hot chocolate or sipping caffe’ corretto, a shot of espresso laced with grappa or Vecchia Romagna. Snatches of Alpine song wafted through the air, courtesy of a slightly tipsy vocal quartet hastily assembled in front of a birreria. Around us, the mountains stood as silent sentinels, looking down through muslin-white mists. What secrets could those summits tell? Tales of religious strife, of night-time escapes, of wars and persecution. But also, tales of simple folk, eking out a living from fruits of the earth, toiling against the forces of Nature. And possibly battling powers beyond the natural world...
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| Torre Pellice in Winter (source: invalpellice.com) |
But I digress. So let’s repair to the “Local History” section of that Torre Pellice bookshop, where I was standing on that cold day when this book caught my eye. I thought that its subtitle was particularly promising – Stories of Demons and Saints, Despots and Lovers, Beasts and Spirits. I bought it.
What a treasure trove of lore and legend it
turned out to be! In a brief foreword, the author describes the vija' -
evening gatherings in some mountain barn where the local villagers would meet
and recount tall tales, whilst the young ones sought their first loves.
Although wary of over-romanticising this “simple” life of the past and its
limited social life, Bertone points out that this was the prime source of local
lore and laments the fact that the old legends started dying out with the
advent of television and the mass exodus of young families to the cities of the
pianura. A lengthier introduction then sets out the nature of the
legends which are recounted in more detail in the actual body of the book.
We meet, first of all, several fantastical
creatures. There are the masche or witches/shapeshifters,
often (but not always) beautiful women whose magical dabblings give them
supernatural powers, chiefly that of changing into animals. The masche are
not necessarily evil in nature, although villagers tend to be wary of them.
Other legends speak of beautiful women hailing from foreign tribes. They turn
heads, much to the consternation of local belles. But things are not what they
seem, and a glimpse of webbed or cloven feet often reveals that all that
glitters is not gold.
The sarvan or sarvanot are hairy “men of the woods”, “sylvan” creatures but also “savants” who are kind enough to share their knowledge with people. Like Italian cousins of the “trolls”, they tend to like practical jokes and sometimes fall in love with humans. But they are also touchy and easily offended. Their female equivalent are the faje – which could be translated as fairies, except that they’re not the cute, winged creatures of Northern traditions but hirsute dwarflike beings.
Sometimes, legends and traditions reinterpret actual historical occurrences, hence the stories referencing Saracen attacks or Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps with elephants. Other legends are associated with specific landmarks, whether natural or man-made. Of particular interests are the various mythical explanations for the formation of the lakes of Avigliana (the majority of speak of an evil village destroyed as a punishment and turned into the picturesque lakes).
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| The town and lakes of Avigliana (source: e-borghi.com) |
Similarly, the bridges built across treacherous rivers in Medieval times were seen as such an “impossible” feat of engineering, that in later centuries they started being considered as the handiwork of the devil which, in local lore, generally ends up hoodwinked by some saintly villager. These semi-religious tales as well as the religious legends in the final section of the book show the intriguing interaction between folk myths and the simple religion of the local people (whether from the Catholic or Waldensian camp).
Enrico Bertone’s work is surprisingly scholarly in its approach; the author sought the earliest published versions of the legends he recounts, and sources are dutifully referenced in footnotes and listed again in an extensive bibliography at the end. An eagle-eyed reviewer on Goodreads mentions some typos in the text – I didn’t notice any, although I did feel that Bertone has the habit of writing “run-on” sentences. But one gets used to the style and, I’m not Italian myself, so who am I to judge? The same review criticized the lack of an index and I concur with that – I’d add that a couple of maps would help the a non-native reader to understand better the setting of the legends.
As I went out of the shop in Torre Pellice, I
noticed a cat lying lithely on a bench, its black fur glistening in the dying
light. Its gaze is still following me like a haunting doubt. Was it really a
cat? Or was it a latter-day masca who, possibly, took an
unlikely liking to this dreamy traveller, at large in the ancient valleys of
Piedmont?
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| Torre Pellice (photo by Celestino2011 on flickr https://www.pinterest.com/pin/112449321922616712/) |
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