The tregenda [from northern Italian dialect: “that which shall be traversed”] refers to gatherings of witches and evil spirits coming together at night to carry out malevolent actions. While belief in these demonic assemblies was widespread across Europe, in the 16th-17th century Friuli, it took a singular form through its connection to the benandanti [lit. “good walkers”] – peasants disrupting these gatherings in spirit form to prevent the evil forces from affecting crops and livestock. Despite their antagonism toward the forces of evil, the benandanti soon fell under the Inquisition’s eye and were subjected to interrogations and trials until assimilated into witchcraft: what for them had been battles against evil became participation in the diabolical sabbath. The following extract from La vita in Friuli by scholar Valentino Ostermann is an 1894 text that offers glimpses both of this now-completed assimilation and of the invisible interconnection between the sabbath imaginary and the Italian and Friulian physical landscape.
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