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# An Unidentified Flying Object in the Italian Sky
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/neopoznannyi-letaiushchii-obekt-v-nebe-nad-italiei/
- Published: 2025-11-23T16:40:06.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:27:56.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Faith, Art, Observations, Nature, Ethnography

“The Walnut Tree of Benevento” is a picture of 1826 by Giuseppe Pietro Bagetti, created for a series of images of the mystical and miraculous phenomena of Italy, in which the artist documented not real events but folk legends, traditions and marvels that existed within Italian culture.

The subject is bound up with the legend of the witches of Benevento. According to folklore, beside an old walnut tree near Benevento in southern Italy, witches gathered for their sabbath, performing rituals and dances. This tree became one of the best-known “magical” objects of Italian popular belief.

Bagetti depicts the tree as a place of supernatural significance, surrounded by a strange radiance and mysterious light, which resembles rather a festival of illuminations than any mystical glow.

The legend has it that on the night of San Giovanni witches fly across the sky by the thousand to the great sabbath held at the walnut tree of Benevento. In the 7th century the Lombards who lived in Benevento performed frightening pagan rites beneath that very walnut tree. The bishop, who disapproved of these practices, seized on the pretext of protecting the Lombards from an impending invasion by the Byzantine army to order the walnut tree to be uprooted, promising that the invaders would depart if the people renounced their pagan rituals. And so it came to pass: the tree was torn out by the roots, and the Byzantine army left the city.

However, once the old tree had been removed, another walnut tree in time grew up on the very same spot, and the diabolical gatherings revived. It was then that the rumour spread that witches from all over the world assemble there on the night of San Giovanni. Later, in the 12th century, this tree too perished, but the rumours of witches’ gatherings beneath the walnut tree of Benevento had taken firm root in popular belief.

The conviction that witches love to gather beneath the walnut tree for their sabbaths spread widely across Italy: in Rome, according to legend, the church of Santa Maria del Popolo was built on the site of a walnut tree around which thousands of demons danced by night. Even in Bologna and Tuscany there were sayings to the effect that witches used to meet or sleep beneath walnut trees.

What distinguished the Benevento walnut tree was that it stood not far from the river Sabato, which strengthened the association of the tree with the infernal world and gave rise to disquieting symbolism and superstition. In some rural districts it is still said that one must not sleep in the shade of a walnut tree, or one may wake with a dreadful headache or fever. Another popular belief holds that if the roots of a walnut tree penetrate a barn, all the livestock will fall ill.

Yet walnut roots do indeed possess unusual properties: they contain juglone, a substance toxic to other plants, on account of which one may from time to time see in nature walnut trees growing quite alone.

But personally I would like to believe that this picture is not a fantasy but a real landscape.