La Befana: The Old Woman Who Brings Gifts at Epiphany
On the night before Epiphany an old woman comes down Italian chimneys to fill children's stockings with sweets, or with coal. She is often called a Roman goddess in disguise, but her name is the name of the Christian feast, and the oldest texts we found that make a figure of it are Tuscan poems of the 15th and 16th centuries.
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