When an Italian left their homeland, they never truly left empty-handed. Sure, the suitcase was often meager: a few clothes, a loaf of bread for the journey, documents carefully folded in an envelope. But inside, somewhere unseen and untouched, something far more weighty traveled: the sound of the village bell tower, the words of a lullaby, the precise gesture with which their grandmother kneaded bread. Memories that take up no space and are not lost at sea.
Italian emigrants, those who crossed the ocean to the Americas between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, those who filled the factories of Northern Europe in the decades that followed, brought with them an invisible Italy. An Italy made of rituals, beliefs, and calendars tied to the seasons and saints. Among these, the ritual of the night of San Giovanni.
One night, grandmothers would rise before dawn, go out into the garden barefoot, and place a bowl on the grass. Not by chance. To collect the dew of Saint John, the dew that heals, protects, and brings good luck throughout the year. It was June 24th, and the world seemed suspended between the sacred and the wild. The feast of Saint John the Baptist falls four days after the summer solstice, when the light is at its brightest and something in the air changes. Italian folk tradition, especially in central and southern Italy, has always treated this night as a threshold.
The most common ritual was simple and beautiful: wild herbs—St. John's wort, lavender, rue, mallow, and elderberry—were gathered and left to steep in a basin of water left out overnight. St. John's water, they called it. In the morning, people washed their faces with that blend scented with fields and stars. It warded off the evil eye, renewed the skin, and warded off bad luck. Every family had its own version, every grandmother her own secret of which herbs to use.
In some areas of Tuscany, people would skip the fire. In Sicily, they would read their fortune by casting a spell on an egg white left in a glass of water under the moonlight. In Calabria, unmarried girls would hide a fig sprig under their pillow to dream of their future husbands. These were ancient rites, likely predating Christianity, which the Church had wisely absorbed, linking them to the figure of John the Baptist.
And then came the years of emigration. Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, millions of Italians left. Their cardboard suitcases contained little: a few clothes, a photograph, perhaps a holy card. But they carried everything in their memory. And among the things they never forget is the scent of certain dewy herbs, the gesture of a grandmother's hands over a bowl of water in the darkness of the garden.
In Argentina, where the Italian community is among the largest and most deeply rooted in the world—it is estimated that over half of Argentines have Italian origins—that night was not forgotten. In Buenos Aires, Rosario, and Patagonia, the descendants of emigrants from Calabria, Campania, and Sicily continued to celebrate June 24th with the same herbs, the same gestures, the same words whispered in the shade of the patio. With one difference: in Argentina, June 24th is the middle of winter. Yet that night was celebrated anyway, because some things don't need the solstice to be true. They only need memory.
This is what it means to be Italian in the world. It's not just the language, it's not just the cuisine. It's a bowl of water left out in the night, it's a gesture passed down without anyone ever thinking to truly explain it, because certain things are understood before learning the words to say them.
