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Updated: May 31, 2025
An Italian crowd is always the best-behaved crowd in the world partly, I take it, from the natural patience of the people, and the fact that nobody is ever in a hurry to move from the place in which he may happen to be; and partly as a consequence of the general sobriety. Even on such a night of saturnalia as this of the Befana very little drunkenness is to be seen.
And it is likely that dancers on the Piazza Navona on a Befana night should belong to this class, for the Campagna shepherd is probably too poor, too abject and too little civilized to indulge in any such pastime. Little of either grace or dignity will be observed in the Terpsichorean efforts of the Roman plebs of the present day.
The Princess Befana rose from her deathbed with more than usual vivacity and went to the length of opening her palace on two evenings in two successive weeks, to the intense delight of her gay and youthful heirs, who earnestly hoped that the excitement might kill her at last, and kill her beyond resurrection this time. But they were disappointed.
And, above all, to-day, when there is a movement in favor of eliminating religion altogether from the school, can we propose to introduce it by cultivating fable? It is such a simple matter to open the door directly to religion itself and allow its radiance to penetrate, warming and invigorating life. But it should enter like the sun into creation, not like the Befana from the chimney-top.
The Italians call it the festival of the "Befana," the word being a readily-perceived corruption of "Epifania."
And I remember on Befana Night we adjourned to the Piazza Navona to blow horns and reed whistles into other people's ears and to have them blown into ours.
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