The serpent in Italian folk belief, from the Marsi to Cocullo

The serpent is perhaps the animal most laden with opposite meanings in European culture. The biblical tradition made it the tempter of Eden, but the ancient world revered it as the guardian of the home and a symbol of healing and renewal. In Italy these two legacies intertwined in a particular way, giving rise to folk beliefs, local cults and festivals that still survive today, especially in the regions of the central Apennines and the South.

The Marsi and the goddess Angitia

The ancients knew the Marsi, a people of present-day Abruzzo settled around Lake Fucino, as snake charmers. Pliny the Elder reports the tradition that they descended from a son of Circe and had by nature a power over reptiles. Virgil, in the seventh book of the Aeneid, presents the Marsian priest Umbro, able to lull vipers to sleep with his song and his touch.

The cult of the goddess Angitia was linked to the Marsi; her sacred grove, the lucus Angitiae, stood on the shores of the Fucino, near today's Luco dei Marsi. The ancients connected the goddess's name with mastery over snakes. This ancient regional reputation is one of the backgrounds against which scholars have read the later traditions of the area.

The serpent as guardian of the home

In the Roman world the serpent was also a protector. In the lararia of Pompeii, the household shrines painted on walls, one or two snakes often appear beside an altar, interpreted as images of the genius loci, the guardian spirit of the house and its inhabitants. The serpent was therefore a benevolent presence, tied to the continuity of the family.

A trace of this idea survived for a long time in the Italian countryside, where in many areas it was held that a grass snake lived in houses or stables as a guardian, and that killing it brought misfortune. Equally widespread was the entirely unfounded belief that snakes sucked milk from cows or from nursing women, a tale that expresses fear for a precious and fragile resource.

Saint Paul, the sanpaolari and the snake-catchers of Cocullo

With Christianity, power over serpents passed to the saints. According to the Acts of the Apostles, Saint Paul, shipwrecked on Malta, was bitten by a viper without suffering harm. In Apulia and Sicily the figure of the sanpaolari or ciaraulari emerged, people who claimed the saint's protection and the ability to handle snakes and spiders, a tradition also linked to tarantism.

At Cocullo, in Abruzzo, the feast of Saint Dominic the abbot is celebrated every year; he was a monk who lived between the tenth and eleventh centuries, venerated as a protector against snakebite and toothache. In spring the serpari gather non-venomous snakes, such as four-lined snakes and grass snakes, which are placed on the saint's statue during the procession, now held on the first of May, and then returned to the wild.

Italian beliefs about the serpent show a surprising continuity between antiquity and popular tradition. The biblical tempter coexists with the household genius of the Romans, and the Christian saint inherits the role of the ancient charmers. More than a single image, the serpent represents in Italy a web of fears and protections, of venom and care, which communities have been able to turn into rite and memory.