The Battistina and other scary stories

Popular beliefs and sorcerers of village According to the elderly
of the Montalbano there are so many stories about fears and “witches” of those which grandfathers used to tell to grandchildren, tight around the fireplace, and there are more than you, may have expected. Some, however, dominate. So, even today, when one of the elderly in Carmignano introduces the subject, an old and repressed memory emerges . “Many remember a name unwillingly”, Fabio Panerai writes in an interesting research on Montalbano between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and pronounces it with circumspection: “la Battistina. ”
She died in 1952 and lived above the pharmacy Lunetta, in the apartment with the terrace looking out across the square. She was a master of embroidery and many little girls came to her to learn. She also did fortune telling by reading cards for a fee. She provided talismans for love and fortune as well as sachets and vials full of dust to be thrown over people. She was active since before the war, it is said that her preparations could serve to reconnect people to procure either diseases or death. Portentous remedies but not without risks, though.

“Word has it that a girl” Panerai writes, “who paid la Battistina to get her boyfriend back after he left her. The girl married the man, but he could no longer walk forward. “Yet, despite this aura of mystery and in the end of terror surrounding this woman, the village had a good opinion of la Battistina. “She was a decent lady and with the money she earned she raised all her husband’s grandchildren”, Mauro Bindi and Evangelista Innocenti recount. She was not a “witch”, the kind that the parish of Bonistallo marked and exorcised. Today, times have changed but in other churches of the municipality there are still blessings. Those people were possessed, forced by stranger forces to procure evil against their will. La Battistina, on the contrary, prepared spells and sold them to those who wanted to use them. Of her own free will, as is she were a freelance professional.
The “paure”(fears), on the contrary, were not human and were living presences that haunted certain places. “Before the fears were everywhere” Iolanda Montagni, who lives in La Serra, tells. In most cases it was the people who played pranks, though”. In some places people believed they really existed. They manifested themselves sometimes outdoors in the form of a small dog tinkling the little bell hanging from its neck at night .Well known is the tinkling of the slope of Renacci.

It often announced the appearance of black and mysterious characters. Then there were the “paure” near Marcignano, where a man was said to have drowned. On the road of Frigionaia, instead they took the form of a candle. Then again in Santa Cristina and at the pozzaccio, towards the fortress, at the source of Bellanda and in Via del Granaio. In the “casa delle paure,” (house of fears) at villa Trefiano, the tenants even lived together with shadows of waiters and diners who led trays of glasses and dishes around the rooms at night, Not even the religious places were immune to the phenomenon. “Don Frati’s said that in some rooms of the rectory of San Michele, le paure took the sheets off him at night,” Mauro Bindi goes on recounting.” There were those who said they saw the shadows of the friars in the rectory ” added Carolina Orlandi and Marisa Bocci, again in Panerai’s research. (wf)

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