The Saint You Are
Not Allowed to See

In the morning the plate is empty and the presents are there. Anyone who had got up in the night to look would have had ash thrown in their eyes.

Americans who hear about this tend to file it under charming regional detail, which undersells it considerably. It is not a local variant of Father Christmas. It is older, stranger, and in the provinces where it is kept it is lived with an intensity that the twenty-fifth of December never quite reaches.

It starts with the letter. Two or three weeks out the children write to Santa Lucia and ask for what they want, and what they want is toys, because the thirteenth is the day for toys. In the Verona households we knew, the thirteenth was the night for the toys named in the letter, and Christmas was where the more practical presents appeared, chosen by the parents and requested by nobody. The twelfth of December is the night you get to ask.

Which hands every parent in the province three weeks of leverage, and they use all of it. The letter has gone. She knows what is in it. The Gastaldo has the ledger. Behave, or it is coal.

Nor is the letter the only evidence that somebody is keeping score. For the two weeks before the thirteenth, a child who has behaved wakes up to find a sweet or a chocolate under the pillow, which is how the thirteenth announces itself and how you know that you are, so far, on the right side of it. And in the evenings somebody from the village puts on the robe and walks the streets with a bell. You do not see her. You hear the bell somewhere down the road, and you go to bed, because being found awake was never the point of the evening.

She Wears a Veil Because of Her Eyes

The people who claim to have seen her describe a white dress and a veil across the face, and the veil is not modesty. In the story she has no eyes.

Lucia was a Sicilian martyr, from Syracuse, and in the iconography she is usually shown carrying her own eyes on a dish. Her name was long associated with the Latin lux, light, and over time the eyes became one of her defining attributes in Christian art. In the northern Italian version those associations turn literal. She arrives veiled, she is not to be looked at, and the child who tries risks ash in the eyes rather than a lump of coal. The costume, the punishment and the patronage are one idea seen from three sides, which is more internal logic than most seasonal figures manage.

The Gastaldo, Who Keeps the Ledger

She does not travel alone, and the reason she does not is the part of the story that holds it all together. She cannot see. Somebody has to lead the animal.

There is a donkey, el mussetto in Veronese and musseto a little further west, sometimes pulling a small cart and in a few towns promoted to a white horse. And there is the Gastaldo, written Castaldo about as often, who leads it. The word arrives in Italian from the Lombards: a gastald was the king's man in a territory, holding the revenues and the accounts and exercising civil and judicial power on his behalf. Over the centuries the title came down in the world, passing through civic and guild use before surviving in the more domestic sense of the steward of an estate or a farm.

In the story he has kept the job description exactly. He leads the animal for a saint who cannot see it, he unloads the heavy baskets, and he carries the ledger in which the year's behavior is written down. Children who come out badly in it get coal and a small stick. That part tends not to appear in the shop windows, and every child in the province knows it anyway.

Why the Thirteenth, and Why Only Here

The legend attached to the city goes back to the thirteenth century. An epidemic affecting the eyes was going through Verona and hitting children hardest, and the city of Verona organized a pilgrimage to the church of Sant'Agnese, in what is now Piazza Bra. The children did not want to go, because it was December and bitterly cold, so their parents promised them sweets and presents if they walked. They walked. The gifts arrived in the night between the twelfth and the thirteenth, and have gone on arriving.

It is a legend rather than a documented sequence of events, and it is worth saying so. What is not in doubt is the geography, which is unusually tight. Santa Lucia brings the gifts in Verona, Bergamo, Brescia, Cremona, Lodi, Mantova and across into western Trentino, and the two of us grew up at opposite ends of that strip, one in Verona and one in Bergamo, with the same bell and the same plate on the table. The tradition reaches further than those names, into other provinces of Lombardy, the Veneto, Trentino and parts of Emilia-Romagna, but it does stop, and the edge is sharp rather than gradual. On the far side the thirteenth is an ordinary day and the children are waiting for somebody else entirely.

She does turn up a long way north as well. The thirteenth is Lucia in Scandinavia too, where girls process in white with crowns of candles and nobody mentions a donkey. A Sicilian martyr became a Swedish procession and a Lombard house call, and neither version is the authentic one.

What each household puts out varies as well, and so does the story. Most commonly it is milk and cookies on the table, and the cookies have a name of their own, biscotti di Santa Lucia, made at home in the weeks before, cut into small shapes and buried under confectioners' sugar. They have an end date as well as a season. In the houses we knew they belonged entirely to the days before the thirteenth, and once Santa Lucia had passed so had the reason for making them. Nobody bakes them on the fourteenth. The Gastaldo gets a glass of wine. In one version the adults leave an empty plate on the table as well, and the saint fills those too. For the donkey it is hay, or flour, or a carrot, and around the lake and up into Trentino a small dish of coarse salt and yellow cornmeal put outside the door. Some towns give her a horse, some give the Gastaldo a bigger part, some are stricter about the ash. Nobody checks that you have done it correctly, because there is no correct version to check against. What is written here is the Verona one, with Bergamo looking over its shoulder. If you grew up in the next province along, some of it will be wrong for you, and being wrong for somebody is the normal condition of the thing.

What the children are taught to do, on the one night that belongs to them, is put something out on a table for somebody they will never meet, and then leave the room.

We make what goes underneath all of that, which is probably why the part that stays with us is the arrangement itself. A plate, a glass, a small dish of flour for the donkey, set out on a mat by somebody who will be asleep long before the guest arrives and who has been told very clearly not to come down. A table laid for a person you will never see is an odd thing to teach a six year old. It is also hard to think of a better one.