Best Books on Italian Witchcraft (Top 14)

From Primary Sources to Folk Tradition

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Italian witchcraft is not a single, unified tradition.

It appears in Renaissance trial records and in village superstition. In protective charms passed down through grandmothers, in the gap between what the Church permitted and what people actually believed, which was often something older and more stubborn than official theology could absorb.

The tradition is also regional in ways that matter. The benandanti of Friuli, the streghe of Tuscany, and the folk healers of Sicily and Calabria are not the same practice, though they wear different names. They share a landscape and a Catholic surface and almost nothing else. Any honest reading list has to reckon with that variety rather than flatten it.

The fourteen books below move across the full range: historical scholarship, primary sources, living practice, and folklore. None of them tells the whole story. Together, they come closer.

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Historical scholarship

The Night Battles — Carlo Ginzburg (1966; English translation 1983)

This is where Ginzburg’s investigation into the Italian folk belief begins, and for many readers it’s the more absorbing of his two books on the subject. Working from trial records he discovered in the archives of Friuli, he reconstructs the world of the benandanti, peasants born with the caul who believed their spirits left their bodies on Ember Days to fight witches in the fields, protecting the harvest if they won, abundance. If they lost, famine.

What’s remarkable is how the Inquisition dealt with them. The benandanti weren’t witches by their own account —they were the opposite: the protectors. But over a century of interrogations, the Church’s framework slowly reshaped how the benandanti understood themselves, until some began to describe what the Inquisitors expected to hear. Ginzburg traces that transformation with precision. The history is specific to Friuli; the pattern it reveals is much larger.

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Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath — Carlo Ginzburg (1989; English translation 1991)

Suppose The Night Battles is focused and intimate, one region, one group, one century. Ecstasies is the panorama. Ginzburg uses the benandanti as a point of entry into a much larger argument: that the European witch’s sabbath was not a church invention but a distorted reflection of something older, a shamanistic substratum of belief that predated Christianity and survived in fragments across cultures as different as Friuli and the Baltic.

Scholars have debated that thesis for decades. What’s not in question is Ginzburg’s method of reading trial records against the grain, listening for what the accused actually said beneath and what the Inquisitors wanted to hear. Dense in places, but worth the effort.

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The Cheese and the Worms — Carlo Ginzburg (1976; English translation 1980)

Not a study of witchcraft in the traditional sense, but essential for understanding the imaginative world Ginzburg keeps excavating. This is the story of Menocchio, a sixteenth-century Friulian miller who had worked out an entirely self-invented cosmology. The universe began as cheese fermenting. Worms appeared, and from those worms came the angels, one of whom was eventually tried and executed by the Inquisition.

What Ginzburg does with Menocchio is show how an ordinary person with limited access to books could still arrive at heterodox beliefs through a combination of reading, folklore, and sheer stubbornness. The book is a masterpiece of microhistory, and it changes how you read everything else on this list. Menocchio isn’t the benandanti, but the machinery that destroyed him is the same.

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Under the Devil’s Spell — Matteo Duni (2007)

Where Ginzburg works across broad cultural history, Duni focuses on the Italian Renaissance specifically — on how accusations of witchcraft moved through everyday life, what kinds of people were accused, and how religious authority, folk belief, and social fear intersected in a particular historical moment.

The book avoids sensationalism. It treats the trial records as evidence of lived experience rather than proof of either superstition or supernatural reality. That restraint is what makes it useful: you come away with a clearer sense of what witchcraft meant socially, theologically, and in daily life.

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Primary sources

Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches — Charles Godfrey Leland (1899)

Aradia is one of the most contested texts in the history of Italian witchcraft and one of the most influential. Leland claimed to have received it from a Florentine woman named Maddalena, presenting it as a genuine record of Tuscan witch belief. Scholars have questioned how much is authentic folklore and how much is Leland’s own invention or embellishment.

The debate matters before you read it, not to dismiss the book but to read it honestly. As folklore, it’s unreliable. As a cultural artifact that shaped modern paganism and contemporary Stregheria more than almost any other single text, it’s indispensable. Read it with both things in mind.

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The Evil Eye — Frederick Thomas Elworthy (1895)

This is the foundational English-language study of the evil eye as a cross-cultural phenomenon, and Italian folk belief is at its center. Elworthy, a Victorian antiquary, collected accounts, charms, and material objects from across the Mediterranean world, with particular attention to the Neapolitan and Sicilian traditions surrounding the jettatura (the person believed to involuntarily carry the evil eye) and the cimaruta amulet.

Read it as a primary source, not an ethnography. Elworthy’s framework reflects the assumptions of Victorian comparative folklore, and some of what he describes requires careful handling. But nowhere else in English will you find this depth of documented material on the evil eye, specifically the gestures, amulets, prayers, and recorded cases. For the malocchio tradition that runs through so much Italian folk magic, it’s irreplaceable.

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Compendium Maleficarum — Francesco Maria Guazzo (1608)

A 17th-century demonological manual produced by a Milanese friar, the Compendium is not a guide to Italian witchcraft practice — it’s a guide to what the Church believed witchcraft was. Guazzo compiled accounts of sabbaths, pacts with the devil, and various crimes attributed to witches, accompanied by woodcut illustrations that have since become among the most recognizable images in the history of occult publishing.

The key is to read it as a primary source rather than a reliable account. What the Compendium documents is fear, specifically, the institutional theology of fear that shaped the witch trials. Understanding that framework changes how you read everything else on this list.

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Living tradition and practice

Witchcraft: The Old Religion — Leo Martello (1973)

This is the book that preceded Grimassi in establishing Italian-American witchcraft as a distinct tradition for English-speaking audiences. Martello, a Sicilian-American activist and practicing witch, claimed initiatory lineage through his family’s folk tradition. While scholars have debated those claims, the book’s portrait of the Strega Tradition as Martello understood it remains historically significant.

He writes with the particular urgency of someone fighting for the legitimacy of the tradition itself, at a moment when that was not taken seriously by either the academic world or the broader pagan community. The emphasis on Sicilian practice and its connection to the cult of Demeter and Persephone, preserved under Marian devotion, differs from Grimassi’s more Tuscan-inflected version of Stregheria. Reading both together makes the regional variety visible.

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Italian Folk Magic — Mary-Grace Fahrun (2016)

Fahrun’s book is the most grounded practical entry on this list. She writes from within the southern Italian and Sicilian family traditions she grew up with: the malocchio (evil eye), protection rituals, household spiritual practice, and the intersection of Catholic devotion and older folk belief. There’s no romanticizing and no academic distance. This is the tradition as it’s still practiced.

It’s also accessible, with no prior knowledge required and no contested historical claims to navigate. If you want to understand what Italian folk magic looks like as a living practice rather than a historical phenomenon, start here.

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The World of Italian Folk Magic — Rose Inserra (2024)

Inserra draws on her own Italian strega heritage to cover the tradition’s full domestic range: kitchen witchery and herbal lore, ancestor work and saint veneration, amulets and divination, the malocchio and its remedies. The scope is broader than Fahrun’s, and the tone is warmer. It’s written for practitioners rather than scholars, and unapologetic about it.

It sits alongside Fahrun rather than replacing her. Fahrun is more culturally specific (southern Italian and Sicilian) and more grounded in family narrative. Inserra is wider in range and draws from across the Italian tradition. Both are worth having.

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Italian Witchcraft: The Old Religion of Southern Europe — Raven Grimassi (2000; originally Ways of the Strega, 1994)

The most widely read introduction to Stregheria. Grimassi blends regional mythology, ritual structure, and folk practice into a coherent spiritual system that has shaped how most English-speaking readers first encounter Italian witchcraft as a living tradition. Originally published as Ways of the Strega in 1994 and revised and retitled in 2000, it’s essentially a complete Book of Shadows for the Aridian Tradition Grimassi developed.

Academic historians have contested some of his historical claims, and it’s worth reading him alongside Ginzburg and Martello rather than in isolation. But as an introduction to one significant current of contemporary Italian-American paganism, and as a practical guide to the seasonal rituals and magical techniques of Stregheria as Grimassi taught it, it holds up.

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Hereditary Witchcraft — Raven Grimassi (1999)

Whereas Italian Witchcraft is Grimassi’s broad introduction to Stregheria, Hereditary Witchcraft focuses specifically on the family-tradition lineage — the idea of craft passed down through bloodlines, the role of initiatory memory, and the practices that distinguish hereditary work from reconstructed or eclectic Wiccan-influenced approaches. It’s the more focused of his two Italian-specific books, and in some ways the more interesting one.

The claims about unbroken pre-Christian lineage are contested territory, as they are with Martello. But Grimassi’s account of how a family magical tradition might actually function — what gets transmitted, how it changes across generations, what the relationship between memory and practice looks like — is worth engaging with on its own terms.

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The Cimaruta — Raven Grimassi (2010)

A focused companion to Grimassi’s broader work, this takes a single object, the cimaruta, a traditional Italian amulet shaped like a sprig of rue, and reads it as a map of folk belief. The symbol’s components each carry meaning: crescent moon, serpent, key, flower. Grimassi traces those meanings through layers of classical, folk, and magical tradition.

Narrower than his other books, and better for it. If the cimaruta has appeared in your family history or you’ve encountered it in Italian folk magic contexts and want to understand what it actually signifies, this is where to go.

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Burn a Black Candle — Dee Norman (1999)

A practical guide to Italian-American folk magic with an emphasis on protection, spiritual cleansing, and the kind of everyday ritual that operates in the space between Catholic practice and older belief. Norman writes from within the tradition rather than as an outside observer.

Shorter and more focused than Fahrun or Grimassi, and useful as a working companion rather than a historical or scholarly resource.

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Cultural context

Italian Folktales — Italo Calvino (1956; English translation 1980)

Not a witchcraft manual. Not a scholarly source. Calvino’s collection of regional Italian folk tales — assembled from nineteenth-century folklorists and rewritten in his own literary voice — is an essential cultural context for anyone trying to understand the imaginative world Italian witchcraft inhabits.

The strega appears throughout: as a wise woman, as a threat, as a keeper of knowledge that sits outside ordinary life. The enchantments, curses, and transformations in these stories follow a logic that connects directly to the folk belief documented in Ginzburg and practiced in Fahrun. Calvino renders it literary without flattening it. Read it alongside the others, not separately.

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How to read across this list

Italian witchcraft resists any single entry point. The tradition is too layered and too regional for one book to cover. The most useful approach is to read in dialogue across categories.

If you want historical grounding first, start with Ginzburg’s The Night Battles before moving to Ecstasies — the former is more focused and more immediately readable, and Ecstasies makes more sense once you’ve spent time in the specific world the benandanti inhabited. Duni’s Under the Devil’s Spell adds the Renaissance legal context that Ginzburg doesn’t linger on. The Cheese and the Worms can go anywhere in the sequence; it’s the most literary of the three and illuminates the Inquisition’s machinery from the inside.

If you’re drawn to living practice rather than history, Fahrun is the most reliable starting point — she writes from within the tradition, without the contested historical claims that complicate Grimassi and Martello. Inserra’s 2024 book covers more ground and is a good companion once you’ve established a foundation with Fahrun.

The primary sources belong at different ends of the belief spectrum. The Compendium Maleficarum documents what authorities believed witchcraft was. Aradia presents itself as what witches believed it to be. Elworthy’s The Evil Eye is the deepest dive into the specific folk practice most commonly associated with Italian witchcraft today. None of them is straightforward. All three are worth reading once you have a sense of the history.

Calvino belongs anywhere in the reading order. He’s the one book on this list that’s genuinely pleasurable to read at any point, and the folk imagination he renders — the wise women, the curses, the night journeys — connects everything else.

I don’t read these as separate categories. The value is in moving between them, seeing how the same belief shifts depending on who’s writing it and why.

Reading across categories gives a fuller picture than relying on a single voice.

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Frequently asked questions

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