The Herbarium of the Basura (Witch). Magic Potions, Elixirs and Spells: From Traditional Ligurian Tales to Harry Potter

A subtle, and just as much mysterious, link connects the nature of a territory, its geographic conformation, its morphology and the fruits it produces to the character of its inhabitants and their imaginary. Myths, legends, fairy tales and traditions of a place connote membership, define its substance, and delimit its physical and cultural boundaries. Thus, through the study and analysis of those extraordinary narratives, the result of a long sedimentation, passed through the plurality of generations that have gone through traditional societies – peasant, seafaring and pastoral or linked to the mountain ruggedness – one may glimpse elements that, at least in appearance, fall outside the tale. These are elements that speak of the everyday habits, actions and gestures fixed in centuries of reiteration; habits, actions and gestures that are always the same and yet always different because not only were the people and families who performed them different, but because the place where they were living represented an all-encompassing microcosm from which to derive all kinds of resources: nourishing, affective, cultural and imaginative.