In Search of Leucàsia with the Ghost of the Count of Sciancato

In Search of… with the Ghost of the Count of Sciancato explores mysteries where history and legend blur and conjecture begins—along with the strange, the macabre, and the uncanny. What follows suggests possible explanations—though not the only ones.

Leucàsia: The White Siren of the Southern Sea

At the southernmost tip of Apulia, where the Ionian and Adriatic seas meet amid striking white cliffs, sailors have long spoken of a beautiful maiden whose song could sway both hearts and storms.

They called her Leucàsia.

According to legend, Leucàsia was a siren whose beauty rivaled her voice. She fell in love with a young shepherd named Melisso, but his heart belonged to another maiden, Aristula. Enraged by his rejection, Leucàsia unleashed furious winds and crashing waves upon the lovers as they embraced along the shore.

The Siren by John William Waterhouse

Choosing death over separation, they clung to one another as the storm-tossed sea engulfed them.

Moved by their tragic devotion, the goddess Minerva transformed the lovers into two rocky headlands, forever facing one another across the bay. Wracked with guilt, Leucàsia turned to stone and was said to have given her name to Leuca, now the town of Santa Maria di Leuca. Today, those headlands are known as Punta Ristola and Punta Meliso.

Some scholars see in Leucàsia another expression of the ancient siren traditions that once echoed throughout Magna Graecia. Others believe the legend arose later, shaped by the dramatic landscape itself as a poetic explanation for the lonely rocks and restless waters where two seas converge.

For generations, fishermen claimed that the wind sometimes carried a woman’s voice across the cliffs at dusk. Others insisted that pale shapes could be seen upon the rocks before storms rolled in from the horizon.

Whether born of imagination, echoing waves, or shifting light upon white limestone, the legend became part of the landscape itself.

Was Leucàsia merely a local legend woven around the rugged coast of Southern Italy?

Or did the ancient Greeks preserve, through myth, the memory of a place where the sea itself seems to sing?

……………………………………

Sebastiano III, Conte di Sciancato, a minor prince of forgotten Lucania, was said to have loved his young bride, Donna Lucrezia di Nerafiora, beyond reason. Unable to accept her death, he turned to forbidden books and desperate learning, seeking to restore her to the world of the living. The attempt cost him his life. The ruins of his torre lie hidden, and when the earth trembles, some whisper he still searches for her.

The Sphinx

A Sphinx from Villa San Michele, Capri

The enduring image of the sphinx has long stirred the imagination, appearing in the haunting works of artists such as Gustave Moreau, Félicien Rops, and Franz von Stuck. Yet my own fascination with this ancient guardian was rekindled years ago during a visit to Villa San Michele on the island of Capri, where two silent sphinxes keep their timeless vigil above the Bay of Naples. The poem that follows is inspired by that memory and by the ancient symbolism of the sphinx as a guardian of mystery, a sentinel at the threshold between the known and the unknowable. ~ Giovanni di Napoli

The Sphinx

Long before kingdoms
Were swallowed by the desert,
Before temples became ruins
And the names of kings dissolved into dust,
The Sphinx stood watch.

She still waits,
In her fatal beauty,
At the threshold—
Between wisdom and folly,
Between life and death,
Between what may be known
And what must remain forever hidden.

For some mysteries
Were placed before mankind,
Not to yield their secrets,
But to teach humility
To those who dare
To meet the eyes
Of eternity.

The Forge Beneath Etna

The Forge of Vulcan, ca. 1660, Luca Giordano

Beneath Etna’s ancient slopes
Burned the hidden forge of
    Hephaestus,
Divine smith of gods and
    heroes,
Where bronze-skinned
    Cyclopes
Toiled without end.

Amid rivers of living fire
And showers of blazing sparks,
The weapons of heaven were
    wrought
Upon anvils older than time.

Each trembling of the
    mountain,
The ringing of immortal
    hammers;
Each torrent of flame,
The breath of the eternal
    furnace
Breaking forth into the
    world of men.

The Timeless Rhythms of the Heavens

A European (skull) mount of a buck,
 recalling the Buck Moon and the
ancient symbolism of renewal

Udremo a notte le sue lunghe muggia, udremo la voce sua di toro;
sorgerà il grido della sua lussuria
udremo nei silenzi della luna.

At night we will hear his long bellows, we will hear his voice like a bull’s;
the cry of his lust will rise;
we will hear it in the silences of the moon.
~ Gabriele D’Annunzio, Il Cervo

July has always seemed to me the most haunted month of summer. The sun still reigns over the earth by day, but the nights grow deeper and more mysterious, as though the heavens themselves were preparing for autumn’s long descent into darkness.

The month has already offered several quiet spectacles. On July 11th, Mars appeared beside the waning Moon and the ancient stars of the Pleiades in the predawn sky, an austere conjunction that recalled the firmament's timeless order. A few evenings later, on July 16th and 17th, brilliant Venus drew close to the slender crescent Moon in the western sky, creating one of the month’s most beautiful pairings before slipping back into the gathering darkness.

Yet some of July’s greatest mysteries still lie ahead.

Between the nights of July 28th and 30th, the Southern Delta Aquariid meteor shower will send ghostly streaks of light across the southern sky. Less brilliant than the famous Perseids, these meteors possess a gentler beauty, appearing like silent embers cast from some unseen celestial fire.

Then, on the night of July 29th, the full Buck Moon will rise.

Named for the season when the stag regrows his antlers, the Buck Moon has long been associated with strength, renewal, and the untamed wilderness. Other traditions know it as the Thunder Moon, the Hay Moon, or the Mead Moon, preserving memories of storms, harvests, and ancient midsummer feasts.

For Christians, the symbolism runs even deeper. The moon has long represented the Blessed Virgin Mary, reflecting not her own light but that of her Divine Son. The stag likewise recalls Christ, who tramples the serpent beneath His feet and leads the faithful toward the sacred waters of eternal life. The annual shedding and renewal of the stag’s antlers has long served as an allegory of resurrection and new life.

As the month draws toward its close, keep watch upon the night sky. Watch for the silent fall of meteors, and when the Buck Moon rises above the horizon, remember the poets who found voices in its silence.

Luna d’argiento, lass’ ’o sunnà,
vaselo ’nfronte, nun ’o sceta…

Silver moon, let him dream,
kiss his brow, do not wake him…
~ Salvatore Di Giacomo, Luna Nova

~ By Giovanni di Napoli, July 27th, Feast of San Pantaleone

Graziella

Graziella, 1879, Jules-Joseph Lefebvre

Graziella gave her heart to a young stranger from a distant land.
While mending her grandfather’s net beneath the shadow of Vesuvius,
Their love blossomed beside the sea.
Yet fate proved stronger than youthful devotion,
And the day came when her beloved was compelled to depart.
Left alone upon the shore, she waited in hope and sorrow,
Her gaze fixed upon the horizon that would never return him.
At last, hope yielded to grief,
And she withered like a flower upon the Siren’s Bay

The Southern Italian Origins of the Vita Eremitica

The Ascension of Mary Magdalene, by
Tilman Riemenschneider (1460–1531)

Among the many traditions surrounding St. Mary Magdalene, few are as intriguing as her vita eremitica, the belief that she spent the final years of her life as a hermit devoted to prayer, fasting, and contemplation.

Although the New Testament says nothing about her life after the Resurrection, an anonymous medieval work known as the Vita eremitica Beatae Mariae Magdalenae profoundly shaped the image of the Magdalene as one of Christianity’s great contemplatives. Modern scholars believe this text was composed in the early ninth century in the monasteries of Southern Italy, where Greek and Latin monastic traditions converged in a remarkable synthesis that left an enduring mark on medieval Christian culture. Drawing heavily upon the Life of St. Mary of Egypt, it presents Mary Magdalene not simply as the first witness of the Resurrection, but as a woman transformed through solitude, asceticism, and union with the Godhead.

Its influence was immense. Many of its themes were later reflected in Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, while its portrayal of Mary Magdalene as the long-haired penitent who retreated to the wilds of Provence inspired generations of medieval and Renaissance artists.

As the legend spread across medieval Europe, it took on new forms. In Provence, Mary Magdalene came to be associated with the cave of Sainte-Baume, where she was believed to have lived as a hermit. In the Italian Alps, she appears in folklore as the Magdalena Selvadega, the “Wild Magdalene.” Naked, clothed only by her long hair, and living apart from society, she became a mysterious figure of forests and mountains, preserving echoes of the vita eremitica while absorbing elements of local folklore.

Devotion to Mary Magdalene found renewed favor in Southern Italy under the Angevin dynasty, whose close ties to Provence, one of the principal centers of her medieval cult, helped foster devotion to the saint throughout the Kingdom of Naples. Thus, a tradition first shaped in the monasteries of the Mezzogiorno continued to flourish under Angevin patronage, reinforcing the dynasty’s prestige and legitimacy.

Though far removed from the biblical narrative, these traditions testify to the enduring fascination with Mary Magdalene as the saint who left the world behind in search of God. They also illustrate that one of the most influential chapters in her medieval legend was first written in Southern Italy, long a crossroads of the Byzantine East and Latin West.

~ By Giovanni di Napoli, July 15th, Feast of Santa Rosalia

Pygmalion and Galatea

Pygmalion and Galatea, ca. 1890, Jean-Léon Gérôme

Pygmalion, a sculptor of rare genius,
Devoted himself to the pursuit of perfect beauty.
From ivory he fashioned a maiden
So flawless that he came to love the work of his own hands.
Day after day he adorned the silent figure,
Speaking to her as though life already stirred beneath her pale surface.
Moved by such devotion, foam-born Aphrodite heard his prayer,
And beneath his touch the statue awakened,
Cold ivory yielding at last to living flesh.

Controra: When Midday Falls Silent

Phoebus Apollo, beneath the blistering sun at Pompeii

As the summer sun bears down with its full fury, I find myself doing what generations of my ancestors from the Mezzogiorno—the Land of the Midday Sun—have done before me: stepping indoors, slowing my pace, and taking a quiet breather.

There is a peculiar hour when the sun is at its zenith, the streets stand empty, the shutters are closed, and even the cicadas seem to dream. This is the controra.

Our forebears called it the Hour of the Spirits. Many believed that, beneath the crushing noontide sun, the souls of the departed and strange meridian demons wandered the silent roads. Children were warned to remain indoors—not only to escape the dangerous heat, but to avoid whatever unseen things lurked in the shimmering stillness.

More than folklore, the controra is also an act of quiet resistance. In a civilization increasingly ruled by haste, productivity, and chrono-capitalism, these still hours remind us that not every moment exists to be exploited. There is dignity in pausing, in daydreaming, in reflection, and in simply being.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that meridionale—“southerner”—derives from the Latin meridies, meaning both “noon” and “south.” To belong to the South has always meant living by the sun, accepting its rhythms, and knowing that, for one mysterious hour each day, the world itself seems to hold its breath.

~ By Giovanni di Napoli, July 5th, Feast of Sant’Antonio Maria Zaccaria

Orpheus and Eurydice

Orpheus and Eurydice, 1893, Auguste Rodin

When Eurydice,
The beloved bride of the
      poet-bard Orpheus,
Was claimed by death
He descended into the shadowed
       realm beneath the earth,
Carrying only his lyre and his
      undying love.

So moving was his lament
That even the rulers of the
      dead relented,
Granting Eurydice’s return
      upon one condition:
He must not look upon her
Until both had emerged from
      the kingdom of shades.

Yet at the threshold
Between darkness and light,
Doubt overcame faith.
Orpheus turned, and in that
      fatal instant
Eurydice vanished once more
      into the depths of Hades.

In Search of the Devil’s Bridge with the Ghost of the Count of Sciancato

In Search of… with the Ghost of the Count of Sciancato explores mysteries where history and legend blur and conjecture begins—along with the strange, the macabre, and the uncanny. What follows suggests possible explanations—though not the only ones.

The Medieval Aqueduct of Salerno: The Devil’s Bridge

In the historic center of Salerno, rising unexpectedly between narrow streets and weathered facades, stand a series of dark stone arches.

They call it the Devil’s Bridge.

Constructed in the ninth century, the aqueduct once carried water to the Monastery of San Benedetto. Built during the Lombard period, its pointed arches cut sharply against the southern sky, a geometry at once practical and severe. For centuries it served the city quietly.

Local legend insists the aqueduct was not built by human hands alone. It was said that a Salernitan magician—sometimes identified with Pietro Barliario, a shadowy figure associated with forbidden knowledge—made a pact with darker forces to complete the arches in a single night. Others claimed the Devil himself assisted in its construction, leaving behind the structure as proof of his labor.

The name endured: Ponte del Diavolo.

19th-century engraving of the Medieval Aqueduct of Salerno,
known as Ponte del Diavolo ("Devil's Bridge").

In later medieval and early modern folklore, such remarkable feats of engineering often attracted supernatural explanation. Towering bridges and aqueducts—seemingly defying gravity—were natural candidates for diabolical attribution. Across Europe, similar structures bear the same name.

During the Middle Ages, the city was renowned for its medical school, the Schola Medica Salernitana, where Greek, Latin, Arab, and Jewish knowledge converged. It was a place where science and superstition coexisted uneasily. Where healing and alchemy, theology and experiment stood in tense proximity.

To some, the arches were a triumph of Lombard ingenuity; to others, they marked a threshold—an intrusion of something not entirely benign.

At night, the structure takes on another character. The arches loom. The spaces between them darken. For generations, townspeople avoided passing beneath them after sunset. It was said witches gathered there, spirits lingered in the shadows, and something watched from the empty span.

Was the Devil’s Bridge merely a marvel of early medieval engineering?

Or did the imagination of a fearful age project its anxieties onto stone and mortar?

……………………………………

Sebastiano III, Conte di Sciancato, a minor prince of forgotten Lucania, was said to have loved his wife more than his soul. When his beloved bride, Donna Lucrezia di Nerafiora, died in a tragic accident, he could not accept the will of fate. In his grief, he turned to ancient books and desperate learning, searching for a way to restore her to the world of the living. The attempt cost him his life. The ruins of his torre lie hidden, and when the earth trembles, some whisper he still searches for her.

Polyphemus and Galatea at Boscotrecase

Polyphemus and Galatea in a Landscape,
Roman wall painting from the villa at
Boscotrecase, late 1st century B.C.

Among the most haunting survivals of Roman painting is Polyphemus and Galatea in a Landscape, discovered in the Imperial Villa at Boscotrecase near the Bay of Naples. Painted in the final years of the 1st century B.C. for the villa of Agrippa Postumus, grandson of Emperor Augustus, the fresco belongs to the celebrated Mythological Room and now resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The fresco depicts the myth of Polyphemus and Galatea. In later Greek and Roman tradition, the Cyclops Polyphemus—best known from Homer’s Odyssey and the volcanic landscape of Sicily—falls in love with the sea-nymph Galatea. She, however, loves the shepherd Acis instead. Consumed by jealousy, Polyphemus kills Acis by crushing him beneath a great stone. Rather than dying, Galatea transforms Acis into a river deity. Yet Roman artists often softened the brutality of the tale, presenting Polyphemus less as a man-eating monster than as a lonely and melancholy figure.

Polyphemus and Galatea
in quiet contemplation

Here, the painter favors atmosphere over violence. Polyphemus sits upon the rocks in quiet contemplation while Galatea appears upon the nearby water, evoking the later Sicilian legend of the Fiume di Aci, the River of Acis. Around them rise delicate columns, statues, trees, and fragments of architecture suspended within an almost dreamlike landscape.

The painting reflects the refined illusionism of Roman wall decoration during the Augustan age. Nature, mythology, and architecture merge into a vision less concerned with dramatic action than with mood and poetic stillness. The watery silence of the composition, softened by distance and faded color, gives the scene the quality of a distant memory.

~ By Giovanni di Napoli, June 9th, Feast of Saints Primus and Felician

Salvator Rosa and the Fall of the Giants

“He is raised aloft that he may be hurled down in more headlong ruin.” ~ Claudian, In Rufinum*

Some works of art seem less like images than warnings. Salvator Rosa’s The Fall of the Giants (1663) belongs to that category. The great Southern Italian painter, poet, satirist, and engraver—born beneath the shadow of Vesuvius—was drawn throughout his life to scenes of upheaval, wilderness, violence, and metaphysical ruin. Few artists captured the sensation of a civilization descending into chaos so powerfully.

Here, Rosa turns to the ancient theme of the Gigantomachy: the war between the Giants and the gods of Olympus. The scene is not orderly combat, but catastrophe itself. Bodies tumble down mountainsides. Stone, flesh, cloud, and smoke collapse into one another. The heavens appear torn open as divine punishment descends from above.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art connects the work to the ancient understanding of cyclical decline found in Greco-Roman tradition:

“According to classical mythology, after the Golden Age came the Silver Age and then declined through the Bronze Age to the wicked Age of Iron. At the end of the Iron Age, brother fought against brother… Giants attacked the very throne of Heaven, piled Pelion on Ossa, mountain on mountain, up to the very stars. Jove struck them down with thunderbolts.”

That passage from Ovid’s Metamorphoses feels strangely contemporary. The Giants are not merely monsters of pagan legend. They represent revolt against order itself: the attempt to storm Heaven, overturn hierarchy, and dissolve the boundary between the human and the divine. Their punishment is not arbitrary cruelty but the inevitable consequence of unleashed disorder.

Rosa understood this deeply. His own life unfolded amid rebellion, satire, and civil unrest, lending his visions of collapse an unmistakably lived intensity. Unlike the polished court painters of his age, he cultivated something harsher and more untamed. Formed amid the dramatic landscapes, popular traditions, and political turbulence of seventeenth-century Naples, his work possesses an intensity that feels almost prophetic. Even his landscapes seem filled with foreboding, as though nature itself remembers fallen civilizations.

What makes The Fall of the Giants so compelling is that Rosa does not present rebellion as triumphant or heroic in the modern sense. The Giants possess immense force, yet that very force becomes self-destruction. The more violently they ascend, the more violently they are cast down.

In this sense, the etching stands as more than a mythological scene. It is a meditation on the end of ages: on hubris, revolt, fratricide, and the collapse that follows when men attempt to place themselves above the order that gave them life.

And perhaps that is why the image still speaks so forcefully today.

~ By Giovanni di Napoli, June 5th, Feast of St. Boniface

* The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that Rosa appended to the print an inscription from Claudian’s In Rufinum. Claudian—often called the last poet of classical Rome—used the downfall of the giants to condemn the corrupt imperial minister Flavius Rufinus, whose tyranny came to symbolize the exhaustion and decay of the Roman world itself.

In Search of Dracula in Naples with the Ghost of the Count of Sciancato

In Search of… with the Ghost of the Count of Sciancato explores mysteries where history and legend blur and conjecture begins—along with the strange, the macabre, and the uncanny. What follows suggests possible explanations—though not the only ones.

Dracula in Naples: The Prince Who Crossed the Sea

In the sun-soaked streets of Naples, where saints and sinners share the same chapels, a stranger is said to have come to rest.

Vlad III of Wallachia

Not a saint, but a prince the world would one day call Dracula.

His name was Vlad III of Wallachia—Vlad Țepeș, the Impaler—a 15th-century voivod whose reputation for ferocity traveled faster than his armies. In life he fought the Ottoman Empire and carved his authority into a fractured frontier world. In death, his legend grew fangs.

Bram Stoker never set his Count in Naples, though he himself once lived there. Yet rumor insists that Vlad’s bloodline reached the Kingdom of Naples through marriage and exile. One of his daughters—Maria, according to local tradition—was said to have wed into Neapolitan nobility and carried with her relics of her father’s life: documents, portraits, perhaps even his remains.

In 2014, renewed attention fell upon a tomb in the cloister of Santa Maria la Nova. Its carved symbols—dragons, sphinxes, obscure heraldry—seemed to some observers to whisper of distant Transylvania. A dragon, after all, was the emblem of the Order of the Dragon, from which Vlad derived the name Drăculea—“son of the Dragon.”

Was it coincidence, romantic imagination, or the faint echo of a Balkan prince whose bones traveled farther than history records?

Most historians maintain that Vlad was buried in Romania, perhaps at Snagov Monastery, though even that grave remains uncertain. His body, like his reputation, resists confinement.

Detail of a marble tombstone depicting a knight's helmet surmounted
by a dragon's head in the small cloister of Santa Maria la Nova, Naples.
Courtesy of visitnaples.eu

Yet Naples is a city that specializes in layered truths. Greek foundations lie beneath Roman streets; ossuaries and catacombs run beneath Baroque churches. If a restless prince were to seek a second resting place, this would not be an impossible city.

No definitive inscription names him. No verified remains confirm the tale. And yet the carved beasts on that Neapolitan tomb—too suggestive to be entirely dismissed—continue to provoke speculation.

Did Vlad the Impaler make the journey in death? Or did Naples, with its love of relics and legends, simply adopt a foreign darkness and make it its own?

In the cloister’s quiet, where sunlight falls through arches onto worn stone, one can almost imagine a prince far from his native Carpathians—exiled even in death, suspended between history and myth.

Is Dracula merely a Transylvanian specter?

Or does a fragment of him lie still beneath Neapolitan sky, his legend drifting like sea mist through a southern city that has always understood how to live with ghosts?

……………………………………

Sebastiano III, Conte di Sciancato, a minor prince of forgotten Lucania, was said to have loved his wife more than his soul. When his beloved bride, Donna Lucrezia di Nerafiora, died in a tragic accident, he could not accept the will of fate. In his grief, he turned to ancient books and desperate learning, searching for a way to restore her to the world of the living. The attempt cost him his life. The ruins of his torre lie hidden, and when the earth trembles, some whisper he still searches for her.

In Search of Alaric I with the Ghost of the Count of Sciancato

In Search of… with the Ghost of the Count of Sciancato explores mysteries where history and legend blur and conjecture begins—along with the strange, the macabre, and the uncanny. What follows suggests possible explanations—though not the only ones.

Alaric I: The King Beneath the River

In the fading years of empire, when marble cracked and legions thinned, a foreign king rode through the gates of the Eternal City.

Sack of Rome by the Visigoths
by Joseph-Noel Sylvestre (1890)

His name was Alaric.

In 410 AD, his Visigothic warriors entered Rome—not as traders or mercenaries, but as conquerors. For three days they looted palaces, stripped gilded statues, and carried away treasures that had glittered since the age of Augustus. Rome had been sacked before in distant antiquity, but not in living memory, and to many it felt like the beginning of the end.

Alaric did not linger to build a throne among the ruins. He marched south, perhaps dreaming of Sicily and Africa’s grain fields. Instead, he died—some say of fever, others of exhaustion, and a few of divine judgment.

What followed is stranger still.

Near the city of Cosenza, by the banks of the Busento River, his warriors are said to have performed an extraordinary feat. They diverted the river from its course and, in the dry riverbed, dug a tomb for their king, laying him to rest with the spoils of Rome—gold, silver, sacred vessels, perhaps even relics taken from ancient temples. Then the waters were returned to their path.

And the captives—so the Gothic chronicler Jordanes records in his Origins and Deeds of the Goths (Getica)—were slain, so that none could betray the secret.

The Burial of Alaric in the Bed of the Busento River, 1895
The Cyclopedia of Universal History by John Clark Ridpath

A king buried beneath flowing water—his tomb sealed not by stone but by current.

Is it merely legend—a poetic flourish from the twilight of empire? Or does Alaric still lie beneath the shifting bed of the Busento, his treasure undisturbed, the river running over his grave for sixteen centuries?

Archaeologists have searched. Treasure hunters have speculated. Modern surveys have mapped the terrain. No tomb has been found; no golden hoard has been drawn from the mud. Yet rivers move, earth shifts, and secrets do not always remain obedient to time.

When the Busento floods and the waters run dark after heavy rain, some in Calabria still recall the old tale—the conqueror of Rome, hidden where no empire can reach him.

Is Alaric’s watery grave only a story born from Rome’s long decline?

Or does he remain there still, enthroned in silence beneath the restless river?

……………………………………

Sebastiano III, Conte di Sciancato, a minor prince of forgotten Lucania, was said to have loved his wife more than his soul. When his beloved bride, Donna Lucrezia di Nerafiora, died in a tragic accident, he could not accept the will of fate. In his grief, he turned to ancient books and desperate learning, searching for a way to restore her to the world of the living. The attempt cost him his life. The ruins of his torre lie hidden, and when the earth trembles, some whisper he still searches for her.

The Riddle of the Sphinx on Elizabeth Street

Now that the pleasant weather has returned, I find myself once again drawn back to a favorite haunt—Elizabeth Street Garden. There is something about the place in springtime—the soft chorus of birds, the tentative blooming of flowers, the slow reawakening of the world. It invites not merely rest, but reflection.

I go there often with a coffee in hand, and almost without thinking, I make my way toward the two stone watchers near the entrance. Twin sphinxes—silent, brooding, yet never without presence. I have taken to greeting them as one might old acquaintances. For reasons I cannot fully explain, I like to speak to them quietly, turning over questions of life, fate, and purpose while they listen without reply.

Their silence, however, is not empty. It speaks in its own way. The sphinx has always been a creature of paradox: guardian and destroyer, keeper of sacred knowledge, poser of riddles whose answers are not given lightly. It symbolizes the dangerous unknown, intellect as a kind of threat, and the capriciousness of fate. It represents knowledge hidden from the many and revealed only to those prepared to receive it.

Sitting there, I am reminded of its ancient question: 

What creature walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening?

The answer, of course, is man—crawling as an infant, walking upright in his prime, and leaning on a cane in old age. Yet the longer one sits with it, the less simple it becomes. It is not merely a clever riddle, but a quiet summation of life itself: dependence, strength, and decline, all bound within a single arc.

And perhaps that is why I return.

There, between the flowers and the stone, with the city just beyond, I find myself in the presence of something older than memory itself—something that reminds me that life is not a straight path, but a passage through stages, each with its own dignity. The sphinx does not answer questions. It asks them. And in doing so, it reveals that whatever knowledge is worth having is not given freely, but earned—slowly, and often in silence.

So I sit, and I speak, and I listen.

And the sphinx, as ever, keeps its counsel.

~ By Giovanni di Napoli, April 15th, Feast of San Cesare de Bus

In Search of Colapesce with the Ghost of the Count of Sciancato

Today, we introduce a new semi-regular feature on Il Regno: In Search of… with the Ghost of the Count of Sciancato. From time to time, the Count’s restless spirit will join us to delve into some of history’s stranger tales and forgotten oddities. ~ Ed.

* * *

In Search of… with the Ghost of the Count of Sciancato explores mysteries where history and legend blur and conjecture begins—along with the strange, the macabre, and the uncanny. What follows suggests possible explanations—though not the only ones.

Colapesce: The Boy Beneath the Island

In the waters off Sicily and Naples, fishermen have long told of a boy who swam too well… and too deep.

They called him Colapesce—Nicholas the Fish.

Bas-relief of Colapesce (Niccolò
Pesce), Via Mezzocannone, Naples
Courtesy of storienapoli.it

Medieval chronicles from the 12th century speak of a youth who could remain beneath the sea for hours, exploring caverns no diver could chart. One account tells of a Sicilian boy summoned before a powerful ruler—often identified as Emperor Frederick II—who demanded proof of his remarkable talent.

Objects were cast into the depths. A goblet. A ring. Perhaps even a crown.

Each time, the boy returned.

But on the final descent, Colapesce discovered something far more unsettling. According to legend, Sicily did not rest securely upon the earth. It stood upon three immense pillars rising from the sea floor. One of them—cracked and crumbling—threatened the island’s stability.

He dove again.

And this time… he did not resurface.

Was it merely medieval imagination attempting to explain earthquakes and the fiery rumblings of Mount Etna? A symbolic tale born in a land shaped by tremors and tides?

Or could there have been a gifted diver—an extraordinary youth whose disappearance grew into myth?

No grave marks his passing. No record confirms his fate.

Yet in the Strait of Messina, where currents churn and the seabed drops away into darkness, sailors still speak of strange shapes moving far below.

Is Colapesce only legend?

Or does he remain there still—holding up an island, suspended between history and myth, beneath the restless sea?

……………………………………

Sebastiano III, Conte di Sciancato, a minor prince of forgotten Lucania, was said to have loved his wife more than his soul. When his beloved bride, Donna Lucrezia di Nerafiora, died in a tragic accident, he could not accept the will of fate. In his grief, he turned to ancient books and desperate learning, searching for a way to restore her to the world of the living. The attempt cost him his life. The ruins of his torre lie hidden, and when the earth trembles, some whisper he still searches for her.

Giambattista Basile, the Neapolitan Father of Fairy Tales

Giambattista Basile

February 26th, National Tell a Fairy Tale Day, is a fitting hour to invoke the shade of Giambattista Basile (c. 1566–1632), a native son of Naples and the first great chronicler of fairy tales as they were truly told: cruel, comic, enchanted, and steeped in blood and fate.

Born in the Kingdom of Naples, Basile lived amid courts where splendor and learning walked hand in hand. He served as a soldier, courtier, and administrator under various noble patrons in Southern Italy, navigating through a world of intrigue, vanity, and sudden reversals of fortune—conditions echoed throughout his stories. Naples itself, a jewel of the Spanish Empire, lent its language and temperament to his writing. He used the earthy, musical Neapolitan language, capturing the voice of the streets, kitchens, and countryside.

His great work, Lo cunto de li cunti (1634–1636), later known as the Pentamerone, was published posthumously, thanks to his sister Adriana. Structured as a frame tale told over five days, it contains fifty stories drawn from ancient oral tradition, many appearing here for the first time in written form. Within its pages lie the earliest known versions of tales later softened into nursery stories, such as Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, and Snow White. However, in Basile’s telling, these are no gentle amusements. Forests are thick with sorcery, princes are ensnared by spells, queens scheme and seethe with envy, and justice arrives late, if at all.

These tales were composed for adult audiences, for courtiers who understood that marvel and monstrosity are closely linked. Basile’s world is governed by Fortune, not sentiment. Wit is a weapon, beauty a peril, and survival a cunning art. The supernatural is ever-present, but never reassuring. Ogres, fairies, and witches obey older, eldritch laws.

To read Basile is to glimpse the fairy tale before it was sanitized for children, a world of candlelit halls, whispered curses, and moonlit paths through perilous woods. On this day dedicated to telling fairy tales, we remember him not just as a storyteller but as a Neapolitan conjurer who recorded ancient spells in black ink, ensuring their darkness, laughter, and dread would never completely fade.

~ By Giovanni di Napoli, February 25th, Feast of Santa Valburga

The King in the Mountain and the Patience of Authority

The Lamentation of King Arthur or King Arthur Carried to the Land on Enchantment by William Bell Scott (1811-1890)

Previous: The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus and the Discipline of Waiting

If the legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus concerns the discipline of the faithful under persecution, the European motif of the King in the Mountain addresses the withdrawal of legitimate authority from a world no longer capable of receiving it. Together, the two form a coherent Christian understanding of time—one that recognizes not only the preservation of faith through waiting, but the suspension of sovereignty itself when order collapses.

Where the Seven Sleepers retreat in order to survive, the King in the Mountain withdraws because authority, when severed from order, ceases to act as such. The king does not perish, nor is he truly overthrown. He recedes. His absence is not failure but power held in reserve until it may once again be exercised without distortion.

Federico II di Svevia leads five thousand
knights into the fiery crater of Mount Etna

In Southern Italy, the figure most often associated with this motif is Frederick II, Stupor Mundi, emperor and king of Sicily, whom medieval legend placed not in a tomb but within Mount Etna (Mongibello) itself. There, beneath the mountain, Frederick II was imagined as a sovereign withholding himself from a disordered age.

This tradition was not limited to imperial figures alone. Medieval romance literature also placed King Arthur beneath Mount Etna. There he was said to dwell under the care of Morgan le Fay, the Fata Morgana (Fairy Morgana), not as a defeated king, but as one withdrawn from the world, preserved in enchantment until the proper hour.

In the Sicilian imagination, Etna thus became a shared locus of suspended sovereignty—imperial and legendary alike—where rightful authority was hidden rather than extinguished.

Contemporary politics presumes that legitimacy must constantly assert itself—through visibility, action, and consent. The older Christian intuition was austere: when authority is rejected, it does not acquiesce—it withdraws. Like the faith preserved by the holy youths of Ephesus, sovereignty abides intact outside the churn of history, awaiting a time when it may once again be exercised without sacrilege.

Seen in this light, the King in the Mountain is not a promise of imminent restoration. It is a warning. Authority, like faith, cannot be manufactured by agitation, nostalgia, or procedural imitation. Both must sometimes endure absence. Both must wait.

For the traditional Catholic today, this completes the lesson begun by the Seven Sleepers. We inherit not only a faith that survives through patience, but the memory of a legitimacy that has withdrawn because the world has lost the capacity for order. Our task is therefore twofold: to preserve belief without illusion, and to honor authority even in its absence.

The Seven Sleepers awaken when the world can recognize the faith. The King in the Mountain returns only when the world has recovered order. Neither can be forced. Both depend upon an order not of our making.

Until then, fidelity waits. Authority waits. And history is permitted to exhaust itself.

~ By Giovanni di Napoli, February 6th, Feasts of Beato Angelo da Furci and Santa Dorotea

The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus and the Discipline of Waiting

Seven papier-mâché sculptures depicting the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus inside the Cappella Pisacane in Angri, Salerno. Photo courtesy of Visit Angri

Next: The King in the Mountain and the Patience of Authority

The medieval legend of the Seven Sleepers—most classically associated with the cave of Ephesus—held a quiet but persistent resonance throughout Christendom. Far from being a marginal curiosity, the tale expressed something deeply consonant with the faith’s traditional understanding of time, endurance, and divine sovereignty.

According to the legend, seven Christian youths, fleeing imperial persecution, fall into a miraculous, Epimenidean sleep and awaken centuries later in a Christianized world. Medieval Christians understood this not as fantasy but as a manifestation of God's providence: empires rise and fall, persecutions pass, but the faith abides intact, waiting to reemerge when the time is ripe.

19th-century engraving, Chatterbox (1888)

For modern traditionalist Catholics, the legend is no mere relic of medieval piety—it is a mirror. The youths who slept through centuries of persecution and decay did not preserve the faith by agitation, managerial reform, or accommodation. They endured by withdrawal, fidelity, and trust that history moves according to God’s hour, not man’s impatience.

Today’s traditional Catholics inhabit a world that has largely apostatized. Institutions persist, but belief has thinned into sentiment or ideology; language remains, but its meaning is hollowed out. The temptation to force renewal through politics, activism, or restless innovation is constant. The Seven Sleepers offer a more exacting lesson: preservation precedes restoration.

Catholics long understood this in practice. When order collapsed, or authority grew hostile, the faithful conserved form—liturgy, custom, hierarchy, rhythm—often quietly, often in marginal spaces, waiting without illusion. Survival was not glamorous, but it was real.

From a traditionalist perspective, our task is analogous. We are not called to “win” the age, but to outlast it. To keep the faith intact while the surrounding civilization exhausts itself. This requires restraint, patience, and an acceptance of obscurity—virtues modernity despises.

The Seven Sleepers awaken not when they choose, but when the world is once again capable of receiving them. So too with us. Renewal will not come from noise or speed, but from fidelity preserved under pressure. The proper hour is not ours to declare. Our obligation is simpler and more austere: to remain asleep to false urgencies, awake to truth, and ready—when God, not history, calls us to rise.

~ By Giovanni di Napoli, February 5th, Feast of Sant’Agata of Sicily

Days of the Blackbird and the Coming of Persephone

Mythological Scene with the Rape of Persephone, early 1680s,
oil on canvas, Luca Giordano, The National Gallery

"Nature, as such, has become extinct in our century. Only in the art of previous centuries do we discover, to our astonishment, that nature is not just a simple physics experiment operated by industrious little organisms." ~ Nicolás Gómez Dávila, The Authentic Reactionary

In Italy, the last three days of January (29th-31st) are known as I giorni della merla or the days of the blackbird. Rooted in folklore, it refers to a number of old legends about a family of blackbirds and the coming of spring. In the Anglosphere, it is often referred to as Italy’s cousin to Groundhog Day. Continue reading