The plague described by Manzoni arrived in Milan in the autumn of 1629, spreading gradually in 1630. In May of the same year, everything fell apart, so much so that people regarded it as one of the most violent and terrible epidemics in history.

At the end of 1500, the Cathedral of Milan was still under construction. Behind it was one of the most infamous places in the city, the area around ​​Via Laghetto, which was the construction site of the Duomo. Today a residential and quiet neighbourhood, between Piazza S. Stefano and the State University, it welcomed the plague sufferers at the time. It was also a place where prostitutes, misfits, thieves lived. In short, the meeting place for the poor, but even workers, glassmakers, tanners, charcoal burners – called in Milanese tencitt (dirty, blackened) because always smeared with black from the coal -, all those who worked on the construction of the Duomo. For this reason, they nicknamed Via Laghetto Ca’ di Tecitt, the house of the dirty (people).

There was even a wet dock (Darsena), a fast artificial waterway connected to the Navigli canals. On these canals, people transported the materials necessary for building the Cathedral, such as blocks of white marble.

Legend has it that the witch of the witches of Milan, called Arima, lived in Via Laghetto 2. We know little about her, but some documents of that time link her personal story to the plague in Milan.

They said she was devoted to the Sabbath and mysterious dances on the roofs of Via Laghetto, after occult banquets, and that she prepared potions and spells at night.

Arima could heal with herbs, which she knew and used with great competence. She possessed the art of distinguishing between good and evil. She could lower the tensions between the witches who crowded another infamous place in Milan at night, Piazza della Vetra, site of the terrible fires of the Inquisition.

She was an evolved figure, endowed with the gift of empathy and compassion, who cured the poor of the neighbourhood with her herbs.

The plague hit all of Milan, except for Via Laghetto and its inhabitants. Therefore, people began to think that Arima had protected the area with a spell.

Perhaps, all that coal transported in that perimeter, with its anti-parasitic and disinfectant power inhaled by the inhabitants, who considered it a powerful medicine, had saved them.

Maybe the marble used to erect the Cathedral deposited everywhere, even on the skin, a cloud of dust, which immunized all people against fleas, vectors of the plague bacterium. Who knows, but we were at the beginning of medical science.

2

In 1630, the charcoal-burner Bernardo Catoni had a fresco painted, the Madonna dei Tecitt, as a thank you to the Virgin Mary for having saved most of the “tecitt” from the epidemic. Well known to all Milanese, it was painted on the Ca’ dei Tecitt, the historic seat of the Milanese charcoal burners.

However, traces of Arima got lost completely. No document registered her death. Her name does not appear among those condemned to the stake by the Inquisition in Milan.

In 1641, they burned alive in Piazza della Vetra the last two witches condemned in the city. The witchcraft trials would continue for eighty years in the Lombard Alpine valleys, until 1721.

In 1788, under the order of Emperor Joseph II of Austria, all documents relating to the Milanese Inquisition, between 1314 and 1764, were burned inside the cloister of S. Maria Delle Grazie.

Unquestionable was the relationship between witchcraft, undernourishment and hunger intuited by Gerolamo Cardano (Pavia, 1501- Rome, 1576). He was a doctor, a mathematician, a philosopher, an astrologer, and an academic, a multifaceted man of the Italian Renaissance. He reported: “miserable women, usually elderly women, live in solitude, in the pre-alpine valleys, feeding on chestnuts, herbs and wild vegetables. Therefore, emaciated, pale, grim and resentful. They denounce, even at first glance, a melancholy pathology. Deformed and maniacally under hallucinations, taciturn and insane, they differed little from those we believe to be prey for the devil. Before giving credit to those who claim to have relations with demons, and before appealing to the interventions of such creatures to explain unusual facts, it is necessary to try to identify any possible natural cause”.

Cardano lived a life of adventures, troubles, and illnesses, on a personal and family level, as testified in his autobiography.

He was born in Pavia, the illegitimate son of the noble Fazio Cardano, a jurist, an expert in mathematics, so famous that Leonardo da Vinci consulted him on geometry puzzles.

His mother lost her three children from a previous marriage to the plague, so she tried to have an abortion but failed.

Gerolamo, in turn, contracted the plague from his nurse, who died.

Subsequently, he moved into his paternal house in Milan, with her mother and aunt.

At 17, he enrolled at the University of Padua, and next at the University of Mantua, to study Medicine and Mathematics.

In 1524, he left Milan again prey to the plague and moved to the University of Padua and Venice, where he graduated in medicine.

He died in Rome in 1576, and we know he would have liked to they buried him in Milan, but it was not possible, due to the plague that, again, had struck the city.

One could almost say, a life marked by the plague!

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Walter G. Sannita writes: “The witch is, by ancient tradition, a manipulator of herbs, an expert in the virtues and powers of natural principles; to such knowledge – as well as a diabolical pact – we attach her ability to intervene on the order of nature, subverting its laws. […] The background […] of European witchcraft, and the vast persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, suggested a natural magic and folk medicine, as an alternative to the official medicine of urban centres. […] In the 16th and 17th centuries, witchcraft trials took place mainly in mountain communities who lived on agriculture, almost totally secluded from the State and Church. […] In these regions, where the cultural background was essentially an amalgam of approximate Christianity and a magical-pagan relationship with nature, the midwife-witch-sorcerer possessed paramedical functions, administered medicines and suggested therapeutic rituals.” (2)

Witches consumed large quantities of food and drink in their Sabbaths. Their fat and unrestrained, “hideous and cannibalistic” meals – people believed they ate children to suck their blood – were a sign of their unpropitious rituals, from the viewpoint of who accused them.

After all, the food of the witches was not that different from that of the poor. Often, people used rye mixed to the flour, which contains a chemical element similar to LSD, capable of giving hallucinations, hence the “flights” of witches.It was food that contained beliefs and symbolic traditions. “Every moment of the encounter corresponded to the infringement of a taboo […] the dance, the ritual itinerary and the meal came together in symbiosis, giving life to a reconstruction marked […] with evil and diabolical tones”, Laura Rangoni and Massimo Centini write. (3)

The rural foods of the witches were linked to spontaneous harvesting and included: berries, herbs, mushrooms, often toxic and poisonous.

Aromatic and medicinal herbs sought in uncultivated fields or grown in the garden, used for herbal teas and decoctions, formed the kitchen/pharmacy of the time. Among these, we find the poppy, the mandrake, the belladonna, capable of causing hallucinations and visions.

Garlic also had a place of honour; so did the shallot and onion.

Witches could hardly afford the luxury of oil, lard, lard, hence animal fat remained the only accessible form of condiment. The main dish of the poor was offal. It included ears, legs, entrails, blood, tripe, lung, heart, sometimes skin and eyes.

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A transgression of cooking rules in the imagination of witches: the preparation of their food was without salt.

Already for the ancient Romans, this sacred ingredient was connected to the immortality of Gods. While in Christian culture, it keeps its magical-sacral characteristics.

In Mediterranean folklore, especially in Italy, it is believed that witches abhor salt, and can ward off bills and spells. Hence the apotropaic use of spreading salt.

Cardano took a lucid and practical position on the pact witches set up with the devil. He tried to refute errors and false explanations, identifying a series of natural causes that could explain miraculous facts: the alterations of the imagination, hallucinations and fancies deriving from environmental causes or food, the roles of dreams, the fears and cruelty of humanity, and human passions far more dangerous than the highly improbable intervention of demons.

NICOLETTA ARBUSTI

(1) Gerolamo Cardano, “De Rerum Varietate”, Basel, Publisher Heinrich Petri 1559

(2) – Walter G. Sannita, “Induzione farmacologica ed esperienze psichiche, medicina popolare e stregoneria in Europa agli inizi dell’età moderna”, in “La strega, il teologo, lo scienziato”, proceedings of the conference “Magia, stregoneria e superstizione in Europa, e nella zona Alpina”, Borgosesia 1983, edited by M. Cuccu e P.A. Rossi, Ecig, Edizioni Culturali Internazionali, Genova,1986.

 (3) Laura Rangoni, Massimo Centini, “Mangiar da streghe”, Mursia Ed. ,1999.