If the reader has ever met with the works of the learned Pitre, or the articles contributed by "Lady Vere de Vere" to the Italian Rivista or that of J. H. Andrews to Folk-Lore, he will be aware that there are in Italy great numbers of Strege, fortune-tellers or witches, who divine by cards, perform strange ceremonies in which spirits are supposed to be invoked, make and sell amulets, and, in fact, comport themselves generally as their reputed kind are wont to do, be they Black Voodoos in America or sorceresses anywhere. But the Italian Strega or sorceress is in certain respects a different character from these. In most cases she comes of a family in which her calling or art has been practiced for manygenerations. I have no doubt that there are instances in which the ancestry remounts to mediaeval, Roman, or it may be Etruscan times. The result has naturally been the accumulation in such families of much tradition. But in Northern Italy, as its literatureindicated, though there has been some slight gathering of fairy tales and popular superstitions by scholars, there has never existed the least interest as regarded the strange lore of the witches, nor anysuspicion that it embraced an incredible quantity of old Roman minor myths and legends, such as Ovid has recorded, but of which much escapedhim and all other Latin writers. This ignorance was greatly aided by the wizards and witches themselves, in making a profound secret of all their traditions, urged thereto by fear of the priests. In fact, the latter allunconsciously actually contributed immensely to the preservation of such lore, since the charm of the forbidden is very great, and witchcraft, like the truffle, grows best and has its raciest flavour when most deeply hidden. Hopiter, and Venus and Mercury, and the Laresor ancestral spirits, and in the cities are women who prepare strangeamulets, over which they mutter spells, all known in the old Roman time,and who c...
