The club emblem of the Italian club Benevento Calcio enjoys cult status, but how did a witch come to be in the emblem? The search for clues leads back to the dark Middle Ages.
No, it couldn’t be right. “I’m superstitious. It’s the witches,” said President Oreste Vigorito, after his club Benevento Calcio had lost their twelfth Serie A game of the 2017/18 season. “It’s because of the evil influences associated with this city. It’s the witches’ fault.”
Vigorito knew exactly what he was getting into – after all, the evil magic is already in the club’s crest. A diabolically grinning witch with a hooked nose and prominent chin rides on her broomstick, her hair fluttering in the wind under her hat. But how did Benevento come to choose a witch?
The solution can be found by taking a look at the history of the city of Benevento, which is located about 60 kilometers northeast of Naples and is known as the “city of witches” in the vernacular. But before they came, the bad was driven out by the good: the city’s name evolved from Maloenton to Maleventum, which translated from Latin means “place of bad events”. When the Romans conquered the city in 268 BC, they promptly renamed it Beneventum, “place of good events”. Benevento was born.
Wilde Szenen am Walnussbaum
But then, in the Dark Ages, they appeared: the witches. Not in the sky, though, but along the Sabato river. According to the book by scholar Pietro Piperno De nuce maga beneventana, published in the 17th century, they were in fact rather groups of Lombard peoples who performed pagan rites. The women are said to have worshipped a golden snake, dancing around a walnut tree with a goat’s skin tied to it. Male warriors rode around the tree and struck the skin with their lances.
The Catholic Christians of Benevento watched the strange events with suspicion; there was talk of witches’ sabbaths. The tree was cut down, but the superstition remained deeply rooted. In 1428, the first woman was convicted of witchcraft in Benevento, and in 1486, the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum, the witch hunt, legitimized the persecution. Women also repeatedly confessed to rituals in Benevento under torture. It was only in the mid-18th century that the gruesome spree finally came to an end, but legend has it that the witches still return to the fabled walnut tree, although no one really knows where it is.
The march through is followed by a negative record
The club, founded in 1929 as Sporting Benevento, seemed to be under an evil spell for a long time. The “Stregoni”, the witches, repeatedly failed in the promotion play-offs for Serie B, twelve times since 1990 alone. In 2005, the club went bankrupt and was re-established as Benevento Calcio. In 2016, the spell was finally broken. Benevento even managed to get into Serie A, which no Italian club had ever done before.
What no club in the major leagues has ever done, however, was lose 14 games in the opening 14 games. In doing so, the club from Campania broke Manchester United’s 87-year-old negative record in 2016/17. Curiously, Benevento only managed to get their first point of the season in the following game against Milan because goalkeeper Brignoli scored a dream header in injury time to make it 2-2.
After being relegated again in the 2020/21 season, Benevento have now returned to the Serie C. In the Girone C, the yellow-reds are four points clear in first place. A strong start, and as everyone knows, there is magic in every beginning. They know this best of all in Benevento.