I also am an affectionate reader of SI from which I have learned so much in the past few years! So many thanks for your amazing insights and beautiful articles!

I have waited quite a while before posting a comment about this specific article, mostly because I wanted to wait to see if other people would have commented on it.

My comment is about the opening line of the article, which states:

“While most Americans will probably recognize the above image as a witch,
a possibly evil character associated with Halloween in the U.S., many
Italians would see a motherly figure who keeps a clean house (hence the
broom) and gives candy or coal to children.”

I am an undergraduate international student, studying Women’s Studies in Canada at the moment and I come from Italy.
As for the discussion of whether la Befana should be seen as a witch or not, I think that it’s not as useful to think of her in English terms given the loaded history and multiplicity of meanings that the English word witch comes with. In what is my understanding of la Befana she is kind of a strega (witch in italian), though I think that most of us always perceived her as a witch in the stereotypical sense of “scary old lady”, who would be a sort of negative/scary alterego of Babbo Natale (literally Christmas Daddy – Santa Claus), since while he would fill us with gifts, she would punish us for our bad behaviors (or sins, if you came from a particularly religious family).

Anyways, I’m going off track… What I wanted to say is that I think that your analysis of la Befana being perceived by Italians as a “a motherly figure who keeps a clean house (hence the
broom) and gives candy or coal to children” is a dangerous slippage into common stereotypes about Italians and Italian culture.

While I was raised in a quite non-traditional family setting in which my mother always saw la Befana as a beautiful, powerful and empowering figure for me to have in my childhood, general understandings of la Befana are rather different.

She is anything but “motherly”. There is actually a very popular lullaby that chants: “Lullaby, Lullaby, Lullaby. To whom will I give this child? I will give him to la Befana who will keep him for a week”

(http://www.mamalisa.com/?t=es&p=2168&c=120 – note how the second line, the child is being given to “the black man” who keeps him for a whole year….This would be so worth of a deeper analysis!
 The ending line varies often, but in the version that I grew up with it said that the child was then given to his mommy who put him to nap/sleep. P.s. I use the pronoun “him” because Italian has genders for nouns, and the noun “child” = “bambino” is masculine, and so the lullaby refers to the child as male. Though some parents will change the lullaby and say “bambina” = “baby girl” instead.).

 In other words, in the popular Italian imagery, la Befana is a scary, old, and also pretty “ugly” lady of whom you (as a child) should be afraid since she can punish you or even kidnap you!

Hence my issue with the broom, which you claimed she uses to keep the house clean…!!! I’m sorry to say this, but I really do not agree with this interpretation. She uses her broom, perhaps also to clean (why not?), but mainly to fly around. (Ok, I realize that know I must sound pretty ridiculous, but please follow me in the analysis of la Befana). Like Santa has an amazing crew of taxy drivers made of incredible flying reindeers, la Befana has her beautiful yet scary brum (of course all these adjectives that I am using are to be understood in the context of children’s imagination).

And yes Marta is right, in many parts of Italy, including Bologna where I am from, children will indeed receive coal, the only thing is that now it is made of sugar, so it’s delicious anyways. But this doesn’t take away the fact that la Befana has and continues to be an (and perhaps the only one!) intriguing female character of the Italian Christmas tradition.

I’m not trying to imply anything here, and please don’t get me wrong, I love the framework that you have adopted on this blog. But perhaps there is a correlation between the analytical slippage with identifying la Befana (a scary, quite evil and ugly image for a lot of children) with a motherly woman who carries a brum as a symbol of her devotion to a clean house, and the fact that often Italian women are stereotypically portraied as (or imagined to be) particularly motherly and obsessed with cleaning chores!

I would like to conclude this already way too long post (my apologies for the long comment but I got dragged by the topic and my personal attachment to it!) with directing you to this link on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Befana#Poems_.26_Songs.5B11.5D)  where they provide the translation for another famous song about la Befana, and in which it is actually clearly spelled out that she uses the brum to fly.

I hope this didn’t sound too redundant I’d love to hear what you think about this (and also if there are any other italians on SI – fatevi sentire! :) )

Thank you for reading and good luck with your amazing work.

(This post brings back wonderful childhood memories!)

I do have one concern with this post, though, and that is the use of quotation marks around the word witch. Although I’m super-pleased that your article presents La Befana in a positive light, the quotation marks suggest sarcasm, disapproval, and a derogatory or belittling attitude towards witches. As a proud witch, it got my hackles up! I cannot imagine that you would post an article on such a progressive site that would use these kinds of quotation marks around the word “black” or “woman” or “Christian”. I would therefore really appreciate it if La Befana could simply be identified as a witch, which is what she is, and not as a “witch”.

Thank you so much :-)

P.S. More info on the use of quotation marks as communicators of point of view can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes