..Eh… beh.. la Candelora io l’ho sempre rispettata, però… beh.. quillu giorno è na vita sempre in sé per sé normale, non è che era na festa… sant’Antonio nvece no, sant’Antonio è sempre stato riconosciuto…[1]

The saint whose cult shows the most widespread and deeply rooted manifestations in our region does not belong, as one might expect, to the crowded ranks of the local saints of greatest fame and prestige, such as St. Francis, St. Rita or St. Clare. According to estimates based on ethnographic surveys, even today, if the Marian feasts are set aside, the sacred figure with the most numerous festive occasions and the most deeply rooted cult in Umbria continues to be that of St. Anthony the Abbot. Throughout the region, in the span of time running from 17 January, the canonical date of the feast, to the beginning of Lent, no fewer than two hundred localities have been recorded in which feasts in honour of the hermit saint are held every year. The feasts are not all held at the same time on the canonical date of the dies natalis, precisely because in some areas – for example between Trevi and Spoleto – within a restricted area they would be so numerous that each would see the participation of residents alone.
The churches of Umbria, moreover, possess numerous pictorial cycles, frescoed from the fifteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth, illustrating the most important episodes of the saint's life as they have been handed down both by the sources officially recognized by the Church and by those held to be apocryphal.
This present-day popularity is surely a substantial residue of the extraordinary centrality that the saint occupied in the cultural horizon of the rural subaltern classes of Europe for roughly a millennium, but above all from the second half of the seventeenth century onward, when the rapid decline of his cult's importance began to appear within the hegemonic strata, which in earlier centuries had enjoyed the wealth and prestige deriving from the management of the hospitals and commanderies dedicated to the saint.
With the collapse of the traditional rural world, the figure of St. Anthony the Abbot therefore seemed destined to succumb to the same fate that had so quickly befallen the world that had elected him: progressively set aside and marginalized, as though it were not worth concerning oneself with a saint confined above all to the stables of peasants and sharecroppers, now that there are no more sharecroppers nor working animals and the few peasants who remain use tractors fitted with air conditioning.

Allora non s’entrava su na stalla senza dì: “Sant’Antonio te l’aiuti! Sant’Antonio l’accresca!” Poi: “Sant’Antonio lo vedesse cresce!” Sant’Antonio benedetto diceva che curava l’animale che uno c(i)avea n casa, ste cose così[2].

Moreover, the cultural policy of the region and of the local authorities has for a long time deliberately and systematically neglected, in the name of a homogenizing modernization, everything that might even distantly recall those warm airs and smells of the stable that form the humus from which almost all of us, willingly or not, come. If this cultural policy that, save for a few exceptions[3], has for years made our region a kind of "land of the repressed" now seems to show signs of change, this is certainly not due to any far-sighted cultural-policy projects, but simply to the fact that today absolutely everyone, excepting of course the various culture departments, has realized that in an increasingly global market only territorial areas endowed with strong and deeply rooted features of identity and specificity can emerge and make themselves visible and appealing, and, for want of anything better, even the surviving feasts of St. Anthony the Abbot will do. St. Anthony the Abbot was certainly one of the most popular saints in the Christian world, even though the strong subaltern rootedness of his cult in Western Europe appears due in large part to the abyssal distance that separates his image, elaborated and lived out within the rural popular classes, from the image that instead results from the hagiographic tradition.
The information conveyed to us by the biographies based on the official hagiographic texts, beginning with the account of his life given by Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria in Egypt, on the life of the hermit saint, seems to have very little in common with the features of the sacred figure that emerges so substantially from the twelfth century onward in popular iconography and cult.
On the one hand Anthony (born in Egypt in 251 and dying at over a hundred years of age in 356) appears as one of the leading figures of Eastern monasticism, intent on pursuing an ascetic holiness in contempt of the world, in the renunciation of earthly goods and in the mortification of the flesh through isolation and fasting; on the other he is regarded instead as the protector of domestic animals, of the stable and the farmyard, the guarantor of the harvests: a powerful figure to whom the rural classes entrust themselves precisely in order to shield from the risk of imponderable adverse events the essential earthly goods constituted by the fruits of their labour.
The reasons why an Egyptian monk devoted to a hermitic and ascetic life, and above all vowed to a severe practice of fasting broken only by purely subsistence vegetable diets, should have become not only the protector of animals but in particular of the pig (the impure animal par excellence in Middle Eastern cultures, which rigidly proscribe its use as food) are in fact extremely complex and due to an intricate process of syncretism, in which the original hagiographic contents had to undergo, under the pressure of popular religiosity, extensive processes of adaptation and transformation, taking into the official liturgy archaic cultic practices and ritual forms present and alive in the rural European world. Such processes certainly made it possible to draw and to force within devotional models controlled by the ecclesiastical authorities, under the aegis of the saint's patronage, forms of religiosity of pre-Christian origin, but at the same time they significantly modified the salient and original features of the figure of St. Anthony the Abbot, who had, so to speak, to remodel himself into a sacred and protective point of reference for subaltern needs far more substantial and carnal than those he had constantly pursued in his life as an ascetic far from the world.
Indeed the gap could not be sharper between the desert hermit in continual conflict with the demonic temptations, which he manages to withstand through the mortification of the flesh, and the cheerful, good-natured figure of the saint as it emerges from popular representations. In these the saint does indeed struggle with the devil, but not in order to resist temptation; rather, to defeat the Evil One in shrewdness and cunning and so attain those satisfactions of a material order that for the peasant and the day labourer are the salt of life, and that are not always readily available in an existential horizon dominated by uncertainty and scarcity.
Thus Anthony, always depicted victorious over a somewhat foolish devil, becomes in the popular universe a kind of champion of the art of getting by, of being crafty, of not letting oneself be cheated by one's malevolent and envious neighbour. He constitutes, ultimately, the mythical projection of the subaltern way of confronting and resolving economic and social contradictions and of reacting to the looming of misfortune through shortcuts and expedients, without ever calling into question the real extent of the relations of economic and social domination.
Thus reshaped and smoothed, the figure of the saint corresponds fully to the subaltern sensibility and does not present those ideological discrepancies that prevent other sacred figures from being so "popular". Despite the affinity between Anthony's path and that of St. Francis (both born and raised in well-off families, they decide to give away their goods to the poor and consecrate themselves to a life of poverty and suffering), the figure of the Egyptian saint in the European West lost its ascetic features, whereas that of the saint of Assisi went on retaining those traits that set him decidedly apart from the common subaltern sensibility. Exemplary, it seems to us, is the way in which the famous and paradoxical episode narrated in the Fioretti, on what perfect joy might be, is rendered at the subaltern level by wholly embracing the point of view of the common sense expressed by Brother Leo.

Quanno san Francesco co frate Leone era ndato a Perugia …perch’andavono a piedi …alora quando ritornavono al convento pe strada je prese n gran temporale e frate Leone s’era ndispettito e chiedeva de fermasse da qualche parte e san Francesco je disse: “Lo sai quale sarebbe la perfetta letizia?” “Che trovassimo na casa per riparo” je rispose frate Leone e san Francesco je disse: “No no, se trovassimo riparo non sarebbe perfetta letizia” e frate Leone: ”Allora avrebbe da smette l temporale” “No no se smettesse non sarebbe letizia”…Nsomma frate Leone je ne disse tre e nessuna stava bene a san Francesco, allora san Francesco je disse: “Adesso quale è la perfetta letizia te lo dico io. Se quanno, tutti bagnati fradici e stanchi, arrivamo a bussà al convento e l padre guardiano viene ad apricce e con un bastone ce dà quattro bastonate, quella è perfetta letizia! Eh eh, hai capito!?[4]

The figure of St. Anthony the Abbot, which took shape in the course of the processes of transformation and adaptation to the real and concrete needs of the people, appears far more complex and stratified than an analysis limited to his patronage over domestic animals alone might suggest.
Traditional iconography displays a richness and articulation of attributes that in some way recapitulate the various protective and devotional typologies that have referred to his figure: first of all the constant presence of the pig, then the staff with the little bell, the tau symbol and finally the fire characterize unmistakably all the depictions of the saint, with different emphases according to geographical areas, epochs, and specific cult requirements.

As we have already noted, the pairing of the pig with the figure of the hermit saint constitutes a strong element of dissonance that various scholars have sought to resolve both from the iconological and from the historical-cultural point of view.
One hypothesis, which takes into account exclusively the possible material transformations undergone by the iconography over time under the pressure of cultic demands, tends to support the thesis that the pig may originally have depicted the tempting demon in the form of a black and shaggy wild boar, and then, only later, under the pressure of the bond established at the popular level between the figure of the saint and his patronage over domestic animals, took on the more familiar and reassuring appearance of the domestic animal.
Indeed in the Christian tradition the pig, an unclean, cloven-hoofed animal, an image of carnal pleasures and appetites, was often used to symbolize the tempting demon, and so the association between the saint and the pig would initially have the meaning of a clear opposition, in which the saint of exemplary life overcomes the demonic temptations, dominating beneath his foot the tempting devil in the form of a swine. The importance of the pig within the rural economy of Christian Europe, and the coincidence of the saint's feast (17 January) with one of the coldest periods of the year, favourable therefore to the slaughter of the pig, would gradually have led to transforming the original negative opposition into an association of a positive kind.
Another explanation, which takes into account instead the events that materially and culturally influenced the spread of the saint's figure and cult in Europe, attempts to define a comprehensive and coherent interpretation of the various iconographic elements characterizing the figure of the saint.
The association among the saint, the pig, the fire, the little bell and the tau symbol would have come about following the transfer, at the end of the eleventh century, of the saint's presumed relics from Constantinople to France and the subsequent creation of the order of the Antonines, whose principal task was to establish hospital communities devoted to the care of gangrenous ergotism, then epidemic. This affliction derived from the dietary consumption of ergot, that is, of the cereal contaminated by the ascomycete fungus Claviceps purpurea, which with its toxic alkaloids caused processes of widespread gangrene of the limbs, accompanied by very intense burning and by sensations of ardent searing associated with hallucinatory states, for which it was called ignis sacer: holy fire and, later, in relation to the monopoly exercised by the order of the Antonines in the treatment of ergotism, also St. Anthony's fire. When the epidemics of ergotism disappeared altogether, following the discovery of the causal relationship between baking with ergot and the onset of ergotism, the name continued to be used and persists to this day, but associated with another affliction that seems to present symptoms close to those of ergotism, though in a strongly attenuated form, herpes zoster.
The Antonines, who wore a habit with a tau-shaped emblem (a sign of the saint's Egyptian origin), treated ergotism with frequent applications of pig lard, and so in the places where the order had its residences they obtained the privilege of raising pigs that could not only circulate freely but also be fed at the expense of the communities, so that the friars were always supplied with the element deemed indispensable to the cure. In order to be easily distinguishable from the other animals, which by contrast could not circulate freely in the urban environment, the pigs belonging to the Antonines, popularly called St. Anthony's pigs, had to wear a little bell or be marked with the order's symbol: at the end of the fourteenth century ten of them could circulate in Città di Castello and six in Narni. Later the little bell of St. Anthony became the recognition symbol of those who collected offerings in the saint's name: in the collection of amulets gathered by Giuseppe Bellucci and displayed at the National Archaeological Museum of Umbria in Perugia there is a bronze bell bearing the sign of the tau, coming from Panicarola, in the municipality of Castiglione del Lago, used during the seasonal collections that constituted the ceremonial fund indispensable for putting on the saint's feast.
This excursus on the historical-cultural vicissitudes of the saint's figure and on the iconographic attributes that characterize him might suggest that the forms of his cult are everywhere very similar and that it is not worth investigating and documenting them locally. But such a perspective, which reflects obsolete nineteenth-century approaches, fails to consider the fact that the popular traditions bound to the saint, even in a relatively small territory such as Umbria, while evidently drawing on a common corpus, have in the various local situations been articulated along distinct lines of tendency, aimed at insistently emphasizing those aspects held to be symbolically and materially most important within the lived experience of the subaltern classes.
The anthropology section of the Man & Territory department (formerly the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology) has for many years conducted campaigns of survey and documentation of local popular traditions and has gathered precise and detailed information regarding the ways in which the feasts in honour of St. Anthony the Abbot are organized and carried out throughout the Umbrian region.
The intricate and varied picture that emerges cannot be summarized in a few pages, but it is worth illustrating its fundamental features.
In a large part of Umbria comprising the northern areas and the western strip bordering Tuscany, characterized in the past by a clear prevalence of sharecropping, the day of the saint's feast (17 January) is marked, rather than by the blessing of the animals, by the blessing of the salt and of the foodstuffs intended for them, which each sharecropping family, after carefully packing them into little bags or bundles, brings before the church. Those present are generally given special little loaves named after the saint or other victuals, the fruit of the collection activities carried out by persons appointed by the parish priest. Sporadically there survives the custom of lighting, on the day of the feast or on its eve, great fires in honour of the saint. Both the remains of the fires and the little loaves were, in the past, the object of practices of a propitiatory or therapeutic-preventive character.
In a more restricted zone comprising the neighbouring mountainous areas of the municipalities of Assisi, Spello, Nocera Umbra and Foligno, the day of the saint's feast is strongly marked by the so-called carità di Sant'Antonio. The most important landowning families of the small mountain villages, on the night of the eve or at the first light of the feast day, offer free of charge to all who come to their houses foods that may consist of bread or of pulses boiled in great copper cauldrons.
A much more thorough discussion would be deserved by the variety of practices bound to the saint's feast in the Valnerina: each small village presents peculiar festive elements, so that it is practically impossible to generalize. Even if with some exceptions, the saint's feast is still marked by the considerable importance that sheep-rearing possessed in the past: at Norcia and Cascia the protagonists of the feast are flocks of sheep, once adorned and beribboned, which are publicly auctioned off by a crier belonging to the local association named after the saint.
In central-southern Umbria, particularly in an area comprising the municipalities of Trevi, Campello sul Clitunno and Spoleto, the cult of St. Anthony the Abbot presents specific and strongly homogeneous features. Singular and of strong evocative significance is that in this zone one can "symbolically" register the opposition between the two cultural traditions bound to the figure of the saint, the one of Eastern origin and the one that later, after the twelfth century, gradually spread through Western Europe.
On the slopes of Monteluco there remain ample traces of a monastic settlement of the mid-sixth century, modified on several occasions over time, founded by Eastern anchorites led by St. Isaac of Antioch – a follower and interpreter of the rules of the so-called Eastern monasticism of which St. Anthony the Abbot is considered the founder – and intent, as we have already had occasion to say, on pursuing an ascetic holiness in contempt of the world, in the renunciation of earthly goods and in the mortification of the flesh through isolation and fasting.
Of this Eastern tradition only a few ruins remain, but if one descends into the valley one finds instead alive and still flourishing the other tradition bound to St. Anthony the Abbot that makes him the saint of domestic and working animals, the protector of the crops and the harvests, the saint of abundance and of alimentary excess.
In every small village there is an association, reserved exclusively to adult males, named after the saint, which possesses, besides a banner, also movable goods (table linen, crockery, vessels for cooking food, etc.) once used to lay on the several, regularly spaced communal banquets on the occasion of the feast. Each society has a statute setting out the obligations and duties of the members, who take turns in the management of the goods and in the practice of the collection, which once involved several seasonal rounds coinciding with the threshing of the grain, the racking of the wine and the olive harvest, and which today comes down to a single round of telephone calls. Beyond the local differences, the saint's feast is still marked by the presence of the frasca (a pole with a wooden cage at the top adorned with evergreens, coloured ribbons, small sweets, etc.), by the blessing of the animals, by the preparation of little loaves or ring-cakes named after the saint and, in the past, by the so-called corsa della stella (the riders had to thread a small stick through a pierced star suspended high in the middle of a road by means of a rope from which hung the prizes due to the winner, consisting of foodstuffs) and by a copious throwing of oranges.
We conclude by taking up again the thread of the twofold figure of the saint: the ascetic desert hermit in the Eastern cult, the protector of animals and of alimentary abundance in the Western cult.
In the area running from Trevi to Spoleto, over the course of the last century, there confronted each other every year not so much two different conceptions of the saint as, rather, two different conceptions of religiosity and of the feast: on the one side the ecclesiastical authorities, who wished to maintain a capillary control over the festive occasions and sought to avoid excesses of food and drink and moments of promiscuity between the sexes, and on the other a subaltern conception of the saint of the pig and of abundance, who on the occasion of the feast was honoured with alimentary excesses, collective drinking bouts and attempts to organize dances without the parish priest's knowledge.

1924 Feast of St. Anthony 27 January

…On the Monday evening the usual little supper, before which, the accounts being presented, I pointed out how it was neither right nor fitting that the whole of the collection should be absorbed by the expenses of the dinner, with an insignificant part for the cult of the Saint, which ought to be the principal aim, and so I proposed that a larger portion of the collection be assigned to the honour of the Saint, with Masses and with the offering of some gift to the church. The proposal, put to a secret ballot, was accepted unanimously, and £80 was allocated to make six candles to serve for the feast, and, should anything be left over, to have some Masses celebrated with it. The new treasurer Fortunati Antonio di Fortunato was charged with carrying out this resolution. I wish to hope that from now on, every year, thought will be given to setting aside a good part of the collection for the purpose of worship, as is proper, and as is also enjoined by the diocesan provisions..[5]

The parish priest tries to intervene in the dynamics of the feast, imposing a different redistribution of the resources to the detriment of the communal banquet, and it seems that all goes smoothly, since the proposal is accepted unanimously by the assembly of members, but:

1925 Feast of St. Anthony 25 January

…An abundant and noisy dinner… The following evening there was the customary little supper… and great was my astonishment and my just indignation when I learned that, notwithstanding the unanimous decision of the year before, namely to use the collection only for the religious feast, it had instead, without any scruple, been merged with the very limited dues of the members and had been almost entirely absorbed by the dinner and the supper. At the moment, given the Bacchic exaltation already well advanced in everyone, I confined myself to protesting only to the santesi and the treasurer, the true culprits of what had happened, reserving to do so later before all the members in a more forceful and effective manner, and perhaps to make a public protest of it from the altar; with the decision to take on directly, myself, the charge of the religious feast in future, should the grave and scandalous fact not be remedied in some way, and should such an unworthy manner of acting not be changed for the coming year[6].

We are faced with a classic example of how the relations between hegemonic classes and subaltern classes have functioned for centuries. In the face of the repeated attempts on the part of the hegemonic classes to intervene in the subaltern practices, in order to abolish or modify them, inasmuch as they were considered by turns either heretical or superstitious or immoral or empirical and not scientifically correct, direct opposition or conflict was never recorded, but forms of passive, creeping and silent resistance were always put into effect.

1926 Feast of St. Anthony 31 January

…The Mass being ended, shortly afterwards we went to the dinner held in the house of the Confraternity, and it turned out, as is usual, abundant and noisy… In the evening, to honour St. Anthony more fully, in the school premises a dance was held until towards midnight!… Several times this year I have tried to prevent, at least on such an occasion, these amusements, but unfortunately mine remained vox clamans in deserto. I wish my successors better success, but I doubt it very much!… The following evening, as is customary, there was the little supper, which turned out abundant and clamorous too, perhaps more so than the dinner. I made my due observations regarding the allocation of the collection, not entirely in conformity with the diocesan prescriptions and with the promises repeatedly made[7].

Works consulted
La légende de Saint Antoine traduit de l’arabe par Alphonse Bonhome O. P., «Analecta Bollandiana», LX, 1942, pp. 143-212.

Une histoire latine de S. Antoine. La ‘Légende de Patras’, «Analecta Bollandiana», LXI, 1943, pp. 211-250.

Inventio sancti Anthonii. Ex codice Namurcensis n. 159(2), «Analecta Bollandiana», II, 1883, pp. 339-354.

Atanasio di Alessandria (san), Vita di Antonio. Detti, lettere, introduzione, traduzione e note di Lisa Cremaschi, Milano, Paoline, 1995. La traduzione latina della Vita fu fatta da Evagrio di Antiochia, morto dopo il 392. Si trova in Patrologia Greca, XXVI, 838-975 e in Patrologia Latina, LXXIII, pp. 126-94.

Baudat Michel, De la Thébaide à Montmajour: les reliques de Saint-Antoine abbé, Arles, Societé des Amis du Vieil Arles, 1994.

Di Cristofaro Longo Gioia, Memoria e mutamento: documenti e analisi antropologica; la festa di Sant’Antonio Abate a Monterotondo, Roma, Bulzoni, 1984.

Di Nola Alfonso, Gli aspetti magico-religiosi di una cultura subalterna italiana. Torino, Boringhieri, 1976, cfr. pp. 206 e seguenti.

Corso Raffaele, Il porco di S. Antonio. (Note e commenti). “Folklore Italiano”, I, 2-3, settembre 1925, pp. 316-317.

Girolamo (san), Vite di Paolo, Ilarione e Malco, a cura di Giuliana Lanata, Milano, Adelphi, 1975.

Hertling Ludwig (von), Antonius der Einsiedler, Innsbruck, Rauch, 1929, XVI+96 pp.

Lupinetti Donatangelo Arturo, Sant’Antonio abate, storia e leggenda: tradizioni e canti popolari abruzzesi , Lanciano, Coop. Editoriale tipografica, 1960.

Mantovi Franco, Le tradizioni popolari di sant’Antonio Abate nella pianura padana, Bazzano, (a cura della Compagnia dell’arte dei brentatori), 1972.

Mazzolari Primo, S. Antonio abate, il contadino del deserto, Vicenza, La locusta , 1974.

Münsterer Hans Otto, Die Secalevergiftung, eine mittelalterliche Volksseuche, “Münchener Medizinische Wochenschrift”, 97, 1955.

Partini Riccardo, Lu nimmice de lu dimonie. Storie e Leggenda di Santo Antonio Abate, “Lares”, V, 1934, pp. 118-153.

Queffélec Henri, Saint Antoine du désert, Paris, Séguier, 1988.

Trebbin Heinrich, Sankt Antonius: Geschichte, Kult und Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Haag und Herchen, 1994.

Notes

[1] Adelaide M., 1917, Stroncone, seamstress, 28.08.1995, 09.05.1998, interviewer: Letizia Cecchi.

[2] Franco C., 1940, Campello sul Clitunno, bricklayer, 03.06.2002, interviewer: Ombretta Cesarini.

[3] Among the few exceptions, the Province of Terni certainly deserves mention.

[4] Elia F., 1915, Ripa, Perugia, housewife, 04.01.2001, interviewer: Mirna Santese.

[5] Parish chronicle of the Parish of San Donato in Campello Alto from 1912 to 1959, by Don Benedetto Fabrizi, vol. I manuscript, Archiepiscopal Curia of Spoleto.

[6] Ibidem.

[7] Ibidem.

Giancarlo Baronti teaches anthropological disciplines at the University of Perugia. Among his publications the following may be noted: Credenze e pratiche relative alla protezione magico-religiosa contro il fulmine e la grandine dalla collezione di amuleti “Giuseppe Bellucci”, pp. 39-89 in “..né porcherie né acque rie..” Forme di protezione magico-religiosa contro il fulmine e la grandine dalla collezione di amuleti “Giuseppe Bellucci”, exhibition catalogue edited by Giancarlo Baronti (Perugia, 12 April – 14 May 1995, Volumnia Editrice, Perugia 1995, 91 pp.), La morte in piazza. Opacità della giustizia, ambiguità del boia e trasparenza del patibolo in età moderna (Argo, Lecce 2000, 416 pp.), Le macchine del santo. Allegoria e tradizione nei Pugnaloni di Allerona (Provincia di Terni, Terni 2001, 64 pp.).