Today is a national holiday in Italy. January 6th marks the feast of the Epiphany, the moment in the Christian calendar when the Three Wise Men—Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar—finally arrive at the humble crib in Bethlehem to pay homage to the newborn Jesus. In theological terms, the Epiphany represents revelation: the manifestation of Christ not merely to the Jewish world, but to all nations. In popular culture, however, it has always been something richer, stranger, and more layered than doctrine alone.
In Italy, the Epiphany is one of those festivals where religion, history, theatre, and folklore coexist comfortably, without the need to explain themselves to one another. This is especially true in Florence, where the Cavalcata dei Re Magi transforms the city into a living Renaissance tableau. Noblemen in brocade and velvet, ladies with elaborate headdresses, musicians, banners, horses, and camels parade through streets that have seen such spectacles for centuries. The procession is not merely a re-enactment; it is an assertion of continuity, a reminder that Florentine civic identity has long been shaped as much by ritual and display as by politics or commerce.
For those interested in how Florence celebrates this day, I have written about it in more detail here:
https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2016/01/17/more-lords-and-ladies-at-florences-cavalcata-dei-re-magi/
and here:
https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2016/01/11/a-cold-coming-we-had-of-it/
Yet, for all the splendour of kings and courts, Epiphany in Italy belongs just as much—perhaps more—to an altogether different figure: La Befana.
On the night of January 5th, Italian children hang stockings by fireplaces, bedposts, or windows in eager anticipation. While the Magi travel solemnly on camelback in daylight processions, La Befana flies invisibly through the winter darkness on her broomstick. She is described as very old, bent, toothless, dressed in rags, her face blackened by soot. She is no ethereal fairy, no graceful Madonna. She is, unapologetically, a crone.
Good children wake to find sweets, chocolates, and small presents in their stockings. Bad children receive coal—though these days it is usually made of sugar. In earlier centuries, however, coal was real enough, and in the depth of winter even a moral rebuke could be repurposed for warmth. Italian folklore, like Italian life, has always been practical in this way.
The name Befana is, of course, a corruption of Epifania, worn down by centuries of oral transmission. But the character herself feels older than Christianity, and this is no illusion. Scholars widely agree that La Befana preserves elements of pre-Christian, agrarian belief systems. She is linked to ancient Roman festivals marking the end of the agricultural year, when the old cycle of time was ritually “swept away” to make room for the new. Her broom is not merely a witch’s accessory but a symbol of cleansing and renewal. Her age represents the dying year; her generosity, the promise of fertility and rebirth.
In this sense, La Befana belongs to a long European tradition of powerful old women—figures who preside over thresholds, endings, and transformations. She is kin to the Fates, to winter goddesses, to the frightening but necessary female spirits who remind communities that life does not renew itself without decay. Christianity did not so much erase these figures as absorb them, clothe them in new meanings, and allow them to survive in the margins of belief.
This is where my title which juxtaposes young mermaids and aged crones finds its deeper resonance. Western imagination has always been far more comfortable celebrating youthful female enchantment than venerating female age. Mermaids are beautiful, dangerous, and eternally young; crones are useful, wise, unsettling—and therefore often mocked or softened into caricature. La Befana, however, resists erasure. She remains central to a national festival, loved by children, tolerated by religion, and rooted in something older than both.
Unlike Santa Claus, whose imported image has grown increasingly glossy and commercial, La Befana has never been fully sanitised. She is still ugly, still old, still slightly frightening. And yet she is benevolent. In a culture that often equates value with youth, her persistence is quietly radical.
There is also something deeply Italian in the way La Befana coexists with the Magi. Kings and beggars, sacred revelation and folk superstition, beauty and decay—all are allowed to occupy the same calendar day. This coexistence reflects a broader cultural instinct: the refusal to reduce tradition to a single narrative. Italy’s past is layered, contradictory, and unresolved, and its festivals mirror that complexity.
If you would like to read more about the origins of La Befana, her linguistic evolution, her pagan ancestry, and the proverb “L’Epifania tutte le feste porta via”—which reminds us that after January 6th the long season of feasting must finally come to an end—you can find my more detailed exploration here:
https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2015/01/06/lepifania-tutte-le-feste-porta-via/
In the end, Epiphany in Italy is not simply about revelation in the theological sense. It is about uncovering what has always been there: the survival of ancient symbols beneath newer beliefs, the endurance of the old woman beside the newborn child, and the uneasy but fertile dialogue between youth and age, beauty and wisdom, mermaids and crones.