READING RECOMMENDATIONS
BURN A BLACK CANDLE
Dee Norman
A wonderful look into the world of Italian American folk magic introducing new and old concepts used in the author's personal life and by her family. Filled with easy step-by-step recipes for magical cures, good luck charms, and seasonal holiday traditions that anyone can easily incorporate into their practice.
THE CHEESE AND THE WORMS: THE COSMOS OF A SIXTEENTH-CENTURY MILLER
Carlo Ginzburg
“The Cheese and the Worms is a study of popular culture in the sixteenth century as seen through the eyes of one man, a miller brought to trial during the Inquisition. Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial records of Domenico Scandella, a miller also known as Menocchio, to show how one person responded to the confusing political and religious conditions of his time.”
ECSTASIES: DECIPHERING THE WITCHES' SABBATH
Carlo Ginzburg
“Ecstasies is the culmination of Ginzburg's long-standing fascination with popular myths that are shared across different cultures and eras. Here he follows the accounts given by those accused of witchcraft centuries ago, gradually weaving them together into a startling pattern, revealing evidence of a hidden shamanistic culture that flourished across Europe for millennia.”
THE EVIL EYE
Frederick Thomas Elworthy
“Written in 1895 this book is now in the public domain and can be accessed readily through various online sources. It is a historical text dealing with superstition common in southern europe (Italy, Spain, ect.) and its possible origins.”
FROM DISEASE TO HOLINESS: RELIGIOUS-BASED HEALTH REMEDIES OF ITALIAN FOLK MEDICINE (XIX-XX CENTURY)
Nelide Romeo, Olivier Gallo, and Giuseppe Tagarelli
The vastus corpus of religious remedies, highlighted in the present work, shows the need for spirituality of the sick and represent a symbolic framework, that works as a filter, mediates, containing the pain that constantly fills everyone’s lives in remote ages even in the third millennium. All of this confirms how important the health-workers know and interpret these existential needs from anthropological and psychological points of view.
HONORING YOUR ANCESTORS
Mallorie Vaudoise
When it comes to any kind of folk practice its starts with understanding one's culture and respecting the traditions passed down by those who came before us. What better way to start than by learning how to honor one's ancestors? As a practitioner of Italian folk practices as well as a student of A. Belloni (who is also mentioned in this list) this book is an excellent resource for those interested in incorporating open-minded modern-day ancestor veneration into their life.
HEALING JOURNEYS WITH THE BLACK MADONA
Alessandra Belloni
"The mysteries of the Black Madonna can be traced to pre-Christian times, however, sacred sites of the Black Madonna are still revered in Italy, and, as Alessandra Belloni reveals, the shamanic healing traditions of the Black Madonna are still alive today and just as powerful as they were millennia ago. Sharing her more than 35 years of research and fieldwork at sacred sites around the world, Belloni takes you on a mystical pilgrimage of empowerment, initiation, and transformation to discover the still-living cult of the Black Madonna in the remote villages of Southern Italy."
IL LIBRO MAGICO DI SAN PANTALEONE
Evocazione Agli Spiriti Benigni
"The Magic Book of Saint Pantaleone, 'Evocation of Benign Spirits' that entails Treasures of Novenas, Tridium's and Prayers to obtain the grace to know with signs and words what one desires through help of Angels and Saints in all the needs of Life. Added to it The Book of Seven Witches"
Originating from the hills of Naples, Italy this book holds some of the most beautiful and simple, yet powerful prayers originally collected and published in the 18th - 19th century. It showcases the uniform relationship between magic and religion within Italian folk magic today. This book unfortunately does not come translated into English and can only be purchased within Europe.
ITALIAN-AMERICAN FOLKLORE
Frances M. Malpezzi and William M. Clements
"Proverbs, Songs, Games, Folktales, Foodways, Superstitions, Folk Remedies, and more." When it comes to learning about folk practices nothing is more important that understanding the culture that it is born from. This book is written in a folklorist's perspective, so it is technically a scholarly work, however, it is easy to digest, funny, engaging, and an excellent resource for individuals wanting to reconnect with their Italian American roots.
ITALIAN FOLK MAGIC: RUE'S KITCHEN WITCHERY
Mary-Grace Fahrun
“Italian Folk Magic is a fascinating journey through the magical, folkloric, and healing traditions of Italy with an emphasis on the practical. The reader learns uniquely Italian methods of magical protection and divination that the author has collected over years of learning from her italian family and friends. The book contains magical and religious rituals and prayers and explores divination techniques, crafting, blessing rituals, witchcraft, and, of course, the evil eye, known as malocchio in Italian--the author explains what it is, where it comes from, and, crucially, how to get rid of it. A wonderful start for anyone looking to learn the basics of Italian folk magic.”
ITALIAN FOLKTALES
Italo Calvino
“Italian Folktales (Fiabe italiane) is a collection of 200 Italian folktales published in 1956 by Italo Calvino. Calvino began the project in 1954, influenced by Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale; his intention was to emulate the Straparola in producing a popular collection of Italian fairy tales for the general reader. He did not compile tales from listeners, but made extensive use of the existing work of folklorists; he noted the source of each individual tale, but warned that was merely the version he used.”
ITALIAN MAGIC: SECRET LIVES OF WOMEN
Karyn Crisis
Looking for the meaning behind your Italian grandma's rituals? Curious about their source and wondering if there's more to the story? Seeking magic beyond what the Romans wrote about in fragments? Wondering why no one can seem to find the mythical witch cults?
This book will answer all these questions and reveal a groundbreaking view into the hidden world of rural Italy: This lifestyle, whose threads of connection go back to the domestic goddess temples of ancient Europe, began to die out in what Italians call the deculturalization of the 1950s. Here, midwives and healers took care of their families and communities. There were no hospitals nor medicine. Romans wrote about these traditions existing before them, and they live on in fragments among most Italian families."
MAGIC A THEORY FROM THE SOUTH
Ernesto de Martino
Translated from de Martino's 1959 Sud e magia, this anthropological work explores "the development of magic and ritual in Enlightenment Naples as a paradigmatic example of the complex dynamics between dominant and subaltern cultures."
NAPOLI MAGICA
Vittorio del Tufo
This book is focused on the Italian city of Naples and dives into a "journey [of the] esoteric and mysterious heart of one of the oldest and most fascinating cities in the world. A journey into myth, legend, the labyrinths of the city and the infinite stories that are nestled there."
Currently it is only published in the Italian language but is its rather short so an excellent resource for those wanting to practice their bilingual language skills.
THE POMEGRANATES AND OTHER MODERN ITALIAN FAIRY TALES
Cristina Mazzoni
"The Pomegranates and Other Modern Italian Fairy Tales presents twenty magical stories published between 1875 and 1914, following Italy's political unification. In those decades of political and social change, folklorists collected fairy tales from many regions of the country while influential writers invented original narratives in standard Italian, drawing on traditional tales in local dialects, and translated others from France. This collection features a range of these entertaining jewels from such authors as Carlo Collodi, most celebrated for the novel Pinocchio, and Domenico Comparetti, regarded as the Italian Grimm, to Grazia Deledda, the only Italian woman to have received the Nobel Prize in Literature. With one exception, all of these tales are appearing in English for the first time."
POWER AND MAGIC IN ITALY
Thomas Hauschild
"Based on vivid and colorful case studies about Mafiosi, priests, mothers, and migrants, the author offers new perspectives on the anthropology of religion and magic through categories of landscape, the body, human practice, and material experience. The focus on women as religious practitioners is linked to the idea of religion as a primary mode of production that creates and helps to maintain human reserves in a fast changing, male-dominated world. It is through this mechanism that the Catholic Church, the oldest existing bureaucratic agency of globalization, has maintained its power. Exploring aspects of spirit experiences, trance, the cult of saints, official ecclesiastical cults, and especially witchcraft, this book reveals the explosive, sometimes violent creativity of religion, its relation to magic, and its multi-facetted social value for humans as reflected in the religiously based, pragmatic realism of everyday life in the Mediterranean."
THE RELIGION OF THE ETRUSCANS
Nancy Thomas de Grummond and Erika Simon
The Roman empire is well known for how it has shaped the foundation of our modern world, but what of the civilization that predates it and spread influence into Roman society? Meet the Etruscans. Before the founding of Rome, the Etruscans thrived for centuries and are claimed to be Italy's most ancient civilization. This scholarly work was made to fill the void of study in English of these ancient people covering "the Etruscan pantheon and the roles of the gods, the roles of the priests and divinatory practices, votive rituals, liturgical literature, sacred spaces and temples, and burial and the afterlife."
THE NIGHT BATTLES: WITCHCRAFT AND AGRARIAN CULTS IN THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
Carlo Ginzburg
“Based on research in the Inquisitorial archives, the book recounts the story of a peasant fertility cult centred on the benandanti. These men and women regarded themselves as professional anti-witches, who (in dream-like states) apparently fought ritual battles against witches and wizards, to protect their villages and harvests. If they won, the harvest would be good, if they lost, there would be famine. The inquisitors tried to fit them into their pre-existing images of the witches’ sabbat. The result of this cultural clash which lasted over a century, was the slow metamorphosis of the benandanti into their enemies – the witches. Carlo Ginzburg shows clearly how this transformation of the popular notion of witchcraft was manipulated by the Inquisitors, and disseminated all over Europe and even to the New World. The peasants’ fragmented and confused testimony reaches us with great immediacy, enabling us to identify a level of popular belief which constitutes a valuable witness for the reconstruction of the peasant way of thinking of this age.”
THE THINGS WE DO: WAYS OF THE HOLY BENEDETTA
Agostino Taumaturgo
“Written by a Catholic priest, this book goes into a condensed history of American-Italian catholic mysticism and the practices of Benedicaria as well as examples of how it is used. It is a very interesting look at how the culture of traditional catholic mysticism and Italian culture (or the lack thereof) has evolved through Americanization in the United States.”