As a child, my grandfather often told me stories from his country and I still have a very vivid memory of a story about a werewolf who lived near my family’s house. I remember that my mother seemed to really believe it, it was rumored that it turned into a man-wolf only at certain times of the year, like during harvest and that in order not to run into any danger, he should be ignored if encountered on the streets.
I recently came across the legend of the “Werewolf of Nicastro”, an event recounted in the 1883 tourist guide “Cities of Southern Italy and Sicily”. In a town in the province of Catanzaro lived a woman who, after making her nature known, was locked up inside the family castle and was subsequently burned alive.
I looked for correspondences with other villages in the area and indeed there were many inhabitants who remembered having heard stories about anthropomorphic beings who had the appearance of a wolf. Some even swore they had seen several werewolves. Each country had its own wolf, sometimes with different habits and physical structure. According to the Calabrian tradition, one could become a werewolf as a result of curses, through infections, bites or pacts with the devil. I began to investigate, focusing mainly on the stories presented by the villages’ inhabitants. Obviously, these stories were mostly told to disguise betrayals, spread terror and above all to prevent women from leaving the house alone.
I believe that these episodes have had a great impact on present-day Calabria, so I decided to represent them visually, maintaining a strong anthropological component.