In Italy if you are not careful, you are condemned to measure out your life in religious festivals. There are so many of them. Perhaps that’s why I find La Befana a bit of a pain coming as it does so hard on the heels of so many others. Or maybe it’s because it is essentially a pagan festival and our civilisation has lost all contact with that world.

But then again, maybe it’s just that I have become a miserable old git.

The Festa della Befana takes place throughout Italy, but especially in the north, on 5 January, the night before Epiphany. It contains elements that are also found in Halloween, Guy Fawkes Night, Christmas and New Year.

There are various versions but in the most dramatic a giant effigy of the Befana, a gnarled old crone covered in soot, is burned at the stake, though the practice is increasingly under threat from the climate change cult.

Meanwhile, the real Befana flies from house to house propelled by her broom stick to deliver presents to children via the chimney. She leaves stockings filled with mandarins and sweets for children who have been good, or coal and garlic for children who have been bad. They in turn leave her a glass of red wine and a mandarin on a plate on which she leaves an ashy hand print if they have been bad.

In some parts of Italy, notably near Lucca in Tuscany, groups of children knock on doors and sing songs dedicated to the Befana, in return for gifts.

The word befana, whose first recorded use in Italian was in the early 16th century, derives from epifania. But the origins of the festival which the word describes go back to well before the three wise men saw the infant Jesus in Bethlehem and had their epiphany.

There is rarely certainty in such matters but the Befana we can safely say derives from ancient deities and fertility rites concerning the death of the old and the birth of the new which were then inherited by the Romans.

If you count from 25 December, as the Romans did, because it was Sol Invictus (the sun’s birthday), not from 22nd December which is the winter solstice, then 5 January is Twelfth Night.

Some cite as a source for the Befana, the cult of Diana, the Roman goddess of hunting, childbirth and much else. At this time of year – above all on Twelfth Night – she flew (perhaps still does) with two minor deities Satia and Abundantia, over the fields to make them fertile.

Others cite Strenia, the Roman goddess of the new year and well-being, as the Rev John J. Blunt explains in Vestiges of Ancient Manners and Customs, Discoverable in Modern Italy and Sicily published in 1823:

This Befana appears to be heir at law of a certain heathen goddess called Strenia, who presided over the new-year’s gifts… Moreover her solemnities were vigorously opposed by the early Christians on account of their noisy, riotous, and licentious character.

But of course both Diana and Strenia were beautiful young women and could not possibly be models for such an ugly old bat as the Befana.

We have the Catholic Church to thank for her transformation. From the fourth century, it banned paganism as satanic but, unable to eradicate it, appropriated it and changed the story.

Just as the Rolling Stones, say, hijacked black rhythm and blues music, so did the Catholic Church hijack paganism. The radiant goddesses of the pagan new year thus became an ugly old woman. According to one Catholic version, the three wise men found Jesus thanks to the Befana who told them the way – not the star of Bethlehem. They asked her to come with them but she told them she was too busy. As a result, she spends eternity giving presents to children in the hope that one of them will be Jesus.

The Befana is often portrayed as a witch but she is quite unlike Anglo-Saxon witches. She does not wear a pointed hat but a coarse head scarf like a peasant version of the mantilla and is not at all wicked. She does have a broom stick but rides it the other way round with the besom at the front. Her broom can symbolise both the stake at which heretics are burnt or the broom that sweeps out the old.

Originally, people would sing and dance round the fire that burned the effigy of the Befana. Coal and ash were seen not as bad – as they are today – but as good. They represented regeneration. Coal is used as a similar positive force in Scotland and the north of England when the first person to enter a house after midnight on New Year’s Eve brings a lump of coal. The direction of the smoke and flames of the pyre built to burn the Befana were carefully studied. In Friuli, according to an old folk song, if the smoke heads East all will be fine: ‘Take your bag and go to market.’  But if it heads West the harvest will fail: ‘Take your bag and leave the country.’

For several decades after the second world war, a bizarre alternative Befana festival was very popular: La Befana del Vigile Urbano (The Befana of the Traffic police officer). The policemen who used to direct the traffic were very badly paid but much loved and so each 5 January motorists would leave presents around the raised plinths on which they stood in the middle of the road. Standing like this on top of a huge pile of presents, they looked like surreal versions of the real Befana on her funeral pyre. These days, of course, so loathed are the traffic police, that no one would leave them any presents, and many people would dearly love to send them up in smoke.