Before cinema turned it into an icon of horror, the lupo mannaro, the werewolf, was a concrete presence in the stories told at Italian peasant evening gatherings. Not a distant creature, but the neighbour, the fellow villager who changed his nature on moonlit nights. Its history runs through classical antiquity, medieval medicine and popular culture until recent times.
The name
The expression "lupo mannaro" comes, according to the most accepted explanation, from a late Latin form such as lupus hominarius, that is, "human wolf", "wolf that is a man". In the dialects the figure takes different names: lupu minaru, lupunaru, lupo menaro and many other variants. Elsewhere, especially in the South, people simply spoke of someone who "is mannaro" or "suffers from the moon".
A Roman tale
One of the oldest stories of transformation into a wolf in Latin literature is found in Petronius's Satyricon, a work of the first century AD. During Trimalchio's dinner the freedman Niceros tells of travelling by night with a soldier. When they reach the tombs, his companion strips, urinates around his clothes and turns into a wolf, then runs off howling towards the woods. The clothes turn to stone.
The sequel is the decisive detail: shortly afterwards a wolf attacks a flock and a servant wounds it in the neck. The next day Niceros finds the soldier in bed, with a wound in the same place. The shared wound between animal and man is a motif European folklore would preserve for centuries.
Pliny the Elder also mentions the belief in men who become wolves, but only to declare it false: a sign that even then the story was circulating widely enough to deserve a denial.
Lycanthropy in ancient medicine
Alongside the marvellous tale there was a medical reading. Greek and later medieval authors described lycanthropy as a form of melancholy: those who suffered from it wandered at night, especially among graves, and believed themselves to be wolves. This interpretation, which placed the phenomenon in the body and mind rather than in the supernatural, coexisted for a long time with popular belief.
Peasant beliefs
In the traditions collected by folklorists between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, above all in southern Italy, certain stable elements recur.
Who becomes a wolf
One of the most widespread motifs links the werewolf's fate to birth on Christmas night. Coming into the world on the same night as Christ was considered a kind of usurpation, which condemned the child to an ambiguous nature. In some areas there was a parallel fate for girls, linked to witchcraft.
The moon and water
The transformation took place on nights of the full moon. The mannaro left the house, rolled in mud or in a puddle of water and roamed the streets howling. It was said that before coming back in he would knock at the door several times, and that whoever opened too soon risked finding the animal before them rather than the man.
Traditional remedies
The folk tale also provided ways of breaking the spell. The most common was wounding the werewolf until a few drops of blood came out, often with a pointed object: the spilled blood would bring him back to human form. It is the same motif of the wound found in Petronius, surviving almost two thousand years.
An anthropological reading
Why did this figure enjoy such success? Anthropologists offer a few answers.
- The wolf was a real danger. For shepherds and farmers the wolf was a concrete threat to flocks and people; the man-wolf gave shape to an everyday fear.
- The boundary between human and beast. The werewolf embodies the idea that a wild part may lie hidden inside a person and surface at certain moments.
- Explaining difference. Unusual behaviour, illness and night-time crises could be interpreted by the community through this narrative pattern.
- Cyclical time. The link with the moon placed the transformation within a regular, predictable rhythm, and therefore one that could somehow be managed.
From the fireside to the screen
With the end of peasant civilisation the werewolf left village storytelling and entered literature and film, losing many of its local features. Silver bullets, for example, belong more to modern fiction than to Italian tradition. Recovering the popular version means finding a subtler figure: not a monster to be killed, but a fellow villager to be recognised, helped and brought back to himself.
In short
- "Lupo mannaro" probably derives from the late Latin lupus hominarius, "human wolf".
- Petronius's Satyricon contains a famous story of transformation and a shared wound.
- Ancient and medieval medicine read lycanthropy as a form of melancholy.
- In the South, birth on Christmas night was held to cause the werewolf's fate.
- The traditional remedy was to wound the man-wolf to bring him back to human form.
