Il vescovo e il “gatto”: credenze albanesi e disciplinamento ecclesiastico nell’Italia Meridionale del XVI secolo

In 1560, the bishop of Larino started proceedings against some inhabitants of his diocese, Albanians of the Greek rite, who had exhumed some corpses accused of having turned into “the cat” (lo gatto), a feline vampiric entity that caused deaths. The minutes of the interrogations, published here with an improved and corrected text, and the comparison with other materials make it possible to trace the presence of this belief (mentioned even in a papal brief of 1564) in the Albanian communities of southern Italy, for which it was yet another element of friction with the Catholic authorities. For the first time, moreover, the origin of the term lo gatto is explained. At the beginning, it had nothing to do with Italian gatto (“cat”), coming instead from the Albanian lugat, “vampire”, a word documented since the mid-fifteenth century. Testimonies from Larino are among the most ancient in describing in detail this belief, which was characteristically reinterpreted by the Albanians who moved to Italy, and who ended up re-motivating the Albanian lugat by associating it with the Italian gatto.