A broom behind the door and a walnut tree by the river: the long night of 'a Janara

Outside the wind is up, the kind that bangs the shutters in the hills and whistles under the doors. In a stone house in the Sannio, before putting out the lamp, a grandmother makes two gestures without thinking: she leans the broom behind the door and leaves a handful of coarse salt on the threshold. Nobody asks her why. Everybody knows: tonight 'a janara may pass by.

They say that in the morning, in the stable, the mare is soaked with sweat, as if someone had ridden her until dawn, and that her mane is full of tight little braids, made by hands nobody saw. And they say the salt on the threshold is still there, every last grain: a sign that someone stopped to count it and didn’t have time to finish.

That’s the legend. But behind the witch of Benevento there’s also a history, with dates, names and court records. Both are worth telling, as long as we’re careful not to mix them up.

A name that lives on the door

Where the word comes from nobody knows for sure, and there are two paths. The first leads to Diana, goddess of the moon and the night: the Latin writer Macrobius reports that for some scholars, among them Nigidius Figulus, Iana and Diana were the same name, with the D added in front to make it easier to say. From there to Dianara, “priestess of Diana,” and then to janara, would be a short step.

The second path leads, literally, to the door: ianua, in Latin, is the front door of a house. And the janara, in the stories, is a creature of thresholds. She gets in by slipping under the door, like a draft, and it’s right at the door that you stop her: all the defenses against her, as we’ll see, are there, between inside and outside.

The name, for that matter, has traveled. In Sardinia the janas are fairies, mostly kindly ones, and domus de janas, “fairy houses,” is the name given to the prehistoric tombs carved into the island’s rock: since July 2025 they have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Grazia Deledda, in Canne al vento (Reeds in the Wind), describes them as “little fairies who during the day stay in their rock houses weaving cloth of gold on golden looms.” Distant relatives of our witch, perhaps, but with a far gentler nature.

As for the janara of the Sannio, one of the oldest written traces of her name was pointed out by Pietro Piperno, the physician we’ll get to shortly: a deed dated February 24, 1273, kept in his day in the archbishop’s library, which among the boundaries of a plot of land on the road to Puglia names a walnut tree, “Nucem dicta ianaram.” A janara tree, in black and white, in a document about land and boundaries.

The walnut tree on the Sabato River

The heart of the legend is a tree. It’s said that the janare of half the world would meet at night under a great walnut tree on the banks of the Sabato, the river that runs through Benevento. And here real history lends the invented one a hand.

In the seventh century Benevento was the capital of a Lombard duchy. In 663 the city was besieged by the troops of the Byzantine emperor Constans II, and that is a fact. It was governed by the young Romuald on behalf of his father Grimoald, who had become king of the Lombards and came down to help him with a large army. The emperor lifted the siege, taking the duke’s sister, Gisa, with him as a hostage.

From here on, the story is told by the Life of Saint Barbatus, written by an anonymous author, in which, as the Treccani Biographical Dictionary observes, history and fantasy are so intertwined that “it is not easy to sift the true from the false.” According to the Life, the Lombards were still attached to old cults: a golden viper, kept in the duke’s palace, and a sacred tree on whose branches a goatskin was hung, which horsemen struck at a gallop to tear off shreds to eat. Once the city was saved, Barbatus supposedly became bishop, cut the tree down, tearing out even its roots, and in its place raised a church, Santa Maria in Voto. The golden viper, secretly handed over by the duchess Theodorada, supposedly ended up melted down into a chalice.

How much of it is true? Paul the Deacon, the historian of the Lombards, says nothing about the viper or the walnut tree. According to the Treccani, the siege ended because Grimoald’s army arrived, not because of a miracle; the viper episode is above all symbolic, and the rides around the tree were more of a game and a warrior’s training exercise than anything else. But in that very rite, the Treccani goes on, “we can recognize the original core of the legend of the walnut tree and the witches of Benevento”: the local Christians saw men yelling as they rode in circles around a tree, and they read the devil into it.

The doctor who went looking for the walnut tree

The walnut tree, as it turned out, refused to stay cut down. Over the centuries people began to say it had grown back, and the one who wrote about it at greatest length was Pietro Piperno, philosopher, physician and chief physician of Benevento. First he devoted a treatise in Latin to it, De nuce maga beneventana; then, in 1639, the Italian version, Della superstitiosa noce di Benevento (On the Superstitious Walnut Tree of Benevento), reprinted in Naples the following year “corrected of many errors.”

Piperno is as precise as a land surveyor. The ancient walnut tree, he writes, stood on the bank of the Sabato, about two miles southeast of the city, not far from the castle of Casalnuovo, on the estate of the nobleman Francesco di Gennaro, where a stone plaque recalled the superstition “deinde regerminantem,” sprouting again after it was cut. And he says he saw another enormous walnut tree around there, so hollow that “vi capono trè huomini,” three men could fit inside. He even put a little map in the book. Others after him looked for the tree at the Stretto di Barba, on the road to Avellino, or at the Piano delle Cappelle. The stretch of riverbank where it supposedly grew has a name that’s already a story: the Ripa delle Janare, the Janare’s Bank.

But don’t picture a skeptic. Piperno believed in witches, and he ends his book praying to Saint Barbatus to free the countryside from “these cursed nests of witches.” The last chapter asks why it is “women rather than men” who practice that art, and the answers, taken from an old treatise on sorcery, are the ones you’d expect: women were supposedly “weak, ignorant, and quick to believe.” Then he copies from Saint Antoninus of Florence an alphabet with two female faults for every letter, warning that he does so “with all due respect to good women.” The good women, let’s hope, forgave him.

The dance on the threshing floor

In the fifteenth century the walnut tree’s fame had already spread far, even on the lips of preachers. In the summer of 1427 Bernardino of Siena preached for forty-five days straight in the Piazza del Campo, and his words have come down to us whole because a cloth shearer, Benedetto di maestro Bartolomeo, jotted them down on wax tablets in a shorthand of his own and copied them out every evening. In one of those sermons there’s a story that sounds like a fairy tale.

A servant of a cardinal, heading toward Benevento at night, sees a crowd of people dancing on a threshing floor, “women and children and young men.” He’s afraid, then he plucks up his courage, goes closer, and in the end he dances too. When the bell rings for matins everyone flees in an instant, except the girl whose hand he’s holding: she pulls, he holds on, until day breaks. He takes her home, and for three years she doesn’t say a word; then it turns out she came from Schiavonia, the Slavic lands across the Adriatic.

Everything we’ll find again in the janara stories is already here: the night dance, the dawn that breaks the spell, the hand that holds on. But the fairy tale ends differently. Bernardino draws a very harsh lesson from it: enchantresses and witches must be wiped out, “so that their very seed is lost.” Some time earlier, in Rome, after his sermons, a woman named Finicella had been burned at the stake. The next year it was Todi’s turn.

The rhyme that led to Benevento

To fly to the walnut tree, the stories say, the janara rubbed herself with an ointment and recited a formula. The version repeated today goes like this: “Unguento unguento, portami al noce di Benevento, sopra l'acqua e sopra il vento e sopra ogni altro maltempo” – ointment, ointment, carry me to the walnut of Benevento, over the water and over the wind and over every other storm. There’s a dialect version too: “'Nguento, 'nguento, mànname a lu nocio 'e Beneviento.”

Its most famous form, though, doesn’t come from the Sannio: it comes from the records of a trial in Umbria. On March 20, 1428, in Todi, Matteuccia di Francesco was sent to the stake, a healer many people turned to, men and women alike, for herbs, remedies and heartache. Two years earlier Bernardino himself had preached in the town, and the sentence itself mentions it. Among the formulas attributed to her is this one: “Unguento, unguento, mandame a la noce de Benivento, supra aqua et supra ad vento, et supra ad omne maltempo.”

The Enciclopedia delle donne (Encyclopedia of Women), in its entry on Matteuccia, puts forward a theory that makes you smile and think at the same time: perhaps part of what made Benevento the witches’ meeting place was the rhyme, unguento with vento and with Benevento. In another trial, in Perugia in 1456, the formula attributed to a certain Mariana indeed becomes “Unguento, menace a la noce de Menavento.” The city’s name bends; the rhyme stays.

Bellezza and her book

A hundred years after Matteuccia, between May and June 1528, in the fortress of Fiano, north of Rome, Bellezza Orsini was put on trial, the natural daughter of an Orsini, known in the Sabina as a healer. Her file carries no dates and ended up in a 1540 volume of the Tribunal of the Governor of Rome: that’s why you sometimes read that year. The historian Michele Di Sivo has studied it in depth.

In her first interrogations Bellezza talked about her work: herbs, and a “book of 180 leaves” that held, she said, the “secrets of the world.” Then came the leading questions, and torture, and the confession took the shape the judge expected: the night flight, the sabbath, the walnut tree of Benevento. The judge, Marco Calisto, came from Todi, Matteuccia’s town, and the story he got looks a lot like the one from a hundred years before.

And yet her own voice has survived in the records too. In a notebook handed to the judges, perhaps dictated to one of her sons, Bellezza compares her art to learning to read: “quante più cose cierchi de inparare tante più sonno quelle che trovi da 'nparare [...] e più vai inanti più vo' ire e non te ne cuntenti. Cusì è la strearia” – the more things you try to learn, the more you find there are to learn, and the further you go the further you want to go, and you’re never content. So it is with witchcraft. More than a witch, she sounds like a woman in love with knowledge. She didn’t leave that fortress alive.

From the courtroom to the scholar’s notebook

There were trials in Benevento too. The scholar Abele De Blasio reported that the archbishop’s archive held some two hundred trial records, most of them destroyed in 1860; another part was lost in the bombings of World War II. Of those women, today, we know almost nothing.

Then, little by little, the wind changed. In 1749 Girolamo Tartarotti of Rovereto published Del congresso notturno delle lammie (On the Nocturnal Gathering of the Lamias), a book against witch trials: the sabbath, he argued, wasn’t real, even though he went on believing in magic. It made a great stir, in years when the trials weren’t over yet.

Once out of the courtroom, the janara entered the scholars’ notebooks. De Blasio himself, a physician and anthropologist born in 1858 in Guardia Sanframondi, published Inciarmatori, maghi e streghe di Benevento (Charmers, Wizards and Witches of Benevento) in 1900, one of the first studies of magic in the Sannio carried out with a scientific method. In it he classified the inciarmatori, that is, the healers, the wizards, the occhiarole (evil-eye healers), the enchantresses, and the janare. He collected formulas and practices, and as a follower of Lombroso he even measured people, according to theories long since discredited; but his pages remain a precious record of a poor and largely illiterate province. The book came back into bookstores this year.

Broom, salt and hair

In the homes, meanwhile, people defended themselves in their own way. The broom behind the door and the little bag of salt or sand on the threshold worked thanks to a flaw of the janara’s: she’s a scrupulous bookkeeper, and she can’t leave a count half done. Broom bristles, grains of salt, one by one: and while she’s counting, dawn comes, and sunlight is her enemy. One tale, perhaps born from a nineteenth-century Neapolitan poem, tells of a man who has his janara wife take him to the sabbath, finds the food bland, asks for salt and, as soon as he sprinkles it on his plate, the whole sabbath vanishes.

It was said that janare were born on Christmas Eve, and that to recognize them you only had to wait outside the church after midnight Mass and watch for the last women to come out. Their weak spot was their hair: but whoever managed to grab one by the hair had to watch out for the question she would ask, “Che tieni in mano?”, what are you holding? Telling the truth, “hair,” was a mistake, and the janara slipped away like an eel; you had to answer “ferro e acciaio,” iron and steel.

The janara’s sisters

Benevento, for that matter, doesn’t have just one witch. In the Triggio, the old quarter that grew up around the Roman theater, people told of the Zucculara, a lame woman who wore showy clogs and announced herself with the clatter of her feet, appearing and disappearing before passersby’s eyes. The quarter’s name comes from trivium, the meeting of three roads, where Hecate was worshiped, the goddess of crossroads, who was said to wear only one sandal: and in that lame woman with her clog some people see a memory of the goddess.

In the wells, meanwhile, lived the Manalonga, “the long-armed one,” who dragged down anyone who passed too close; and in the houses the Urie, household spirits that recall the Lares of the Romans. The fear of wells hasn’t entirely gone away: the singer-songwriter La Niña, on her 2025 album Furèsta, dedicated a song to the Manalonga, inspired by the habit, still alive today, of keeping away from certain wells.

What’s left of her

In Benevento, 'a Janara doesn’t frighten anyone anymore: she’s become one of the family. In 1860, the very year when, according to De Blasio, the trial records were being destroyed, Giuseppe Alberti created a saffron-yellow liqueur in the city, distilled from some seventy herbs and spices, and called it Strega, “witch.” On the label, to this day, the witches dance around the walnut tree. The company’s legend is a sweet one: the witches supposedly brewed a potion that could keep together forever the couples who drank it together.

From that liqueur, in 1947, Italy’s best-known literary prize took its name; it was born in Rome in the salon of Maria Bellonci, where writers and artists gathered on Sundays: the Amici della domenica, the Sunday Friends, as the jury is still called. Guido Alberti, owner of the liqueur company, provided the backing and the name.

The city’s soccer team has a witch riding a broomstick on its crest, and its players are the Stregoni, the Wizards. On Corso Garibaldi, in Palazzo Paolo V, there’s Janua, a museum devoted to the janare, born of more than twenty years of research in the Sannio: holy cards, ex-votos, human-shaped breads, herbs of power, and the idea that those women were above all keepers of a tradition, sometimes healers, sometimes witches. And for years now the historic center has had its own Notte delle Streghe – Janare Festival (Night of the Witches): in July 2025 it reached its thirteenth edition, with an exhibition titled “Janara: mistero, fede e leggenda” (Janara: Mystery, Faith and Legend) and the tours “Sulle orme delle Janare” (In the Footsteps of the Janare).

The walnut tree even had its moment at La Scala: in 1812 Salvatore Viganò staged his ballet Il noce di Benevento (The Walnut Tree of Benevento) there, and from a theme in that ballet Niccolò Paganini drew his variations for violin, Le streghe (The Witches). Closer to our own day, Eugenio Bennato and Pietra Montecorvino dedicated a song to the janara, E' na janara, tied to the movie Janara, shot in the Sannio in 2015, and built right around that “ferro e acciaio.”

At dawn

Let’s go back to the stone house. The wind has dropped, and outside it’s getting light. The broom is still behind the door, the salt on the threshold, and nobody will ever know whether someone stopped to count during the night. Tomorrow evening the grandmother will put the broom back in its place: nun se sape maje, you never know.

Maybe the janara is the shape country people gave to their nights: the wind, the tired horse, the darkness that won’t lift. Behind that shape, in the court records, are real women, who healed with herbs and were called witches. Telling their story with respect is the best way to shut the door on fear.

Where we come in

We’ve also told the janara’s household habits, along with those of two gentler spirits, in the guide to the Munaciello, the Bella 'Mbriana and 'a Janara.