#benevento

A different kind of Witches' sabbath

The Walnut Tree in Benevento (the Witches' Sabbath), circa 1822–1826. Painted by Giuseppe Pietro Bagetti.

This eerie and fantastical painting depicts the legendary witches' sabbath under the walnut tree in Benevento, a site steeped in Italian folklore. Beneath a spectral night sky, scores of ghostly figures dance in spiraling formations around the enchanted tree, while a glowing, chandelier like apparition hovers ominously overhead. The scene evokes a haunting blend of the supernatural and theatrical, capturing the dark mystique of occult ritual with dreamlike intensity.

 The Walnut Tree of Benevento  (Il Noce di Benevento) is one of the most famous witchcraft legends in southern Italy. It was believed to be the tree beneath which the witches of Benevento, or janare, gathered for nocturnal rites, dances, banquets, and flights to the sabbath.

The legend was already strongly associated with witchcraft by the fifteenth century. One of the most important references comes from the 1428 trial of Matteuccia di Francesco of Todi, where an incantation sends the witch to the walnut tree of Benevento “over water and over wind”. From that point, Benevento became a repeated point of reference in Italian witch-trial imagination: to say that a woman went to Benevento was to associate her with witchcraft.

A later and influential source is Pietro Piperno’s seventeenth-century treatise, Della superstitiosa noce di Benevento (1640). Piperno’s work explicitly presents the walnut as a “superstitious” tree and organises the legend around its origin, its cutting down by St Barbatus, its supposed demonic associations, and the gatherings of witches and magicians at that place.

The Christianised version of the story connects the walnut tree to the Lombards of Benevento. According to the tradition reported in later sources, the Lombards continued certain pagan or semi-pagan rites after their formal conversion, including rituals around a sacred tree. St Barbatus, bishop of Benevento, is said to have ordered the tree to be cut down in order to destroy the pagan cult associated with it.

Charles I of Anjou over the body of Manfred after the Battle of Benevento on 26 February, 1266

È stata la mano di Dio / The Hand of God Paolo Sorrentino. 2021

Station Via degli Italici, 95, 82026 Morcone BN, Italy See in map