An astral traveler in Tuscany
a neighbor with an unusual talent
I know a man in Tuscany, Lido, a retired contadino, or farm laborer, who believes he can travel outside his body while asleep. He’s the neighbor of a friend for whom I used to housesit when she was away. My friend lives in an old village on the edge of the woods near Siena, in a building once part of a monastery now divided into flats. Lido lives in the flat next to hers along the loggia.
Lido is a heavy-set man in his late sixties, with a ruddy face, peppery stubble of beard, intense blue eyes, one of which strays to the right. He is always bundled in several layers of wool because he is sensitive to cold. He is never seen without a hat indoors and out. Most of the year, he wears a brown corduroy pork-pie hat, which in summer is replaced by a snazzy straw hat.
A steep flight of stairs leads down from the loggia to a cobbled courtyard. Lido spends most of the day sitting in a chair on the loggia right outside his kitchen door, with a calico cat perched on each armrest, another on his shoulder, and a fourth in his lap. When not napping, he reads Paperino, the Italian version of Donald Duck. Whenever I enter or exit my door, I have to walk right past him, so it’s only natural that we should become acquainted. He enjoys talking about himself, village history, and his unusual profession.
Lido is a dowser, but he is also known as the local mago—or Magus. Belief in the power of maghi is widespread throughout rural Italy. A mago can talk off warts, remove the evil eye, help trace a missing person or a lost pet. You’ll find many in the cities, too, listed on Yelp, although urban ones tend to be more sophisticated, claiming association with mystical schools from Egypt or parapsychological institutes. They offer services such as reading cards and auras or preparing amulets to bring you luck in gambling, love, and careers. In the Tuscan countryside, the activities of a mago like Lido serve more essential needs: healing, dowsing for water, soothing toothaches, backsprain, insomnia, or finding a runaway cow. Lido has quite a clientele: I have noted the stream of visitors arriving in fancy cars, sometimes with foreign license plates, on Thursdays, when he receives his public.
Lido says that he was not always a healer. He began as a dowser in his teens, discovering he had the knack for finding underground water. After an accident with a tractor, he developed the healing touch in his hands. His mother also had this gift.
In addition to the unexpected boon of the therapeutic touch, Lido also acquired the ability to travel outside his body, or so he says. He doesn’t use the New Age term, “astral travel.” Instead, he describes this experience as “traveling at night” or “flying.” In his early experiments with his new talent, he liked to play tricks on his friends while they were gathered for a merenda –or picnic. He would fly over their table, snatching food from their forks and overturning flasks of wine, to their great consternation because he was, of course, invisible while all this was happening.
With gusto he recounts to me one episode when he terrorized some local men by grabbing a flask and taking a swig of wine. With theatrical flair, he acts out the scene: the flask bobbing up high into the air, the astonishment in their faces as he titled it to his lips, the wine gushing down his throat and into his stomach.
“Yes,” he chuckles, “they could see the wine suspended in the air above their heads, but my stomach and my whole body were completely invisible!” It’s worth noting that this event occurred during the day but for Lido’s body, back home asleep in bed, it was nighttime. Therefore, when he travels, he also jumps about in time.
After that occasion, he confesses, he had to be more careful, because one of the men had seen him when he was outside his body, which put him in grave danger. The next time they met, the man accused him, “I know what you did! Better watch out!” This suggests that he has special powers too and might even be a sort of rival. Lido swears he heeded the warning and stopped frightening his neighbors. “I didn’t want to be responsible if someone had a heart attack,” he explains.
He tells me that he prefers to stick close to home while traveling. When he was younger, he used to fly all the way to Siena to visit friends there. But this was more problematic. The further from home, the less energy he has. He also finds city environments confusing when outside his body. Streets and buildings all look identical to him, and he cannot find familiar landmarks to guide him. Moreover, he is unable to read street signs, numbers, or names on doorbells, which all seem written in an unfamiliar alphabet.
“So I end up completely lost and tired and so I just fly home straight into bed.”
Tuscans are notorious pranksters and you probably think that Lido is just pulling my leg. But it may be more complex than that. Perhaps these experiences he relates with a master story-teller’s comic mimicry originate in very vivid dreams embellished for gullible or willing listeners. Yet I am sure there lies a grain of his own truth in these tales, and that Lido really does believe that he travels about without his body while asleep.
I have met other people who boasted of performing similar feats, including a boy in fourth grade who told of strange roamings through the air and ended up in a mental institution. Another was a musician in Rome who complained that her mother was always leaving her body and scaring her half to death when she couldn’t get back in. These are urban stories by people exposed to popular occult fiction on tv.
But Lido’s stories derive from the long history of rural magic in Tuscany, hearkening back to Pre-Christian fertility rites, concealed beneath local traditions, myths, and superstitions.These were documented by the 19th century collector of Tuscan folklore, Charles Godfrey Leland in Etruscan Roman Remains.
Lido has a special connection with the Etruscans, who once inhabited this area which is still full of undiscovered tombs. Years ago, he became a celebrity when he helped an archaeologist identify an Etruscan site through his dowsing abilities. He claimed he could sense the presence of coins and iron tools buried in the earth. (In Alice Rohrwacher’s recent film — La Chimera, the main character, a tomb hunter, played by Josh O’Connor, uses this method to locate Etruscans tombs) The grateful archaeologist acknowledged Lido’s role in the excavation by including a note about him in the scholarly article he published, along with a photo. Lido would proudly show the book containing this monograph to visitors to his home. By the time I first met Lido, the book had lost its cover.
Unlike other dowsers, Lido uses no willow wand or pendulum. He relies on his physical sensation.
“I feel a cold prickling in my knees when I walk over the spot. That’s how I know and the worse I feel, the deeper it is.”
Lido is convinced that there is an Etruscan tomb buried under the cellar of his house. He can feel skeletons under him while he is sleeping in bed and he has seen the tomb while out flying.
Several years ago, I had a weird dream, unlike any other I had ever had before or since. I dreamed I got out of bed in the middle of the night and went downstairs to the kitchen. The stairs were dark, but I could see my bare feet sticking out under the hem of my nightgown as I descended the creaking stairs one by one. I entered the living room and lay down on the couch, and when I wanted to go back up to bed, I was paralyzed. In a panic, I cried out to my husband -- then woke up in bed, and everything was normal. Was it only a dream? Had I been sleepwalking for the first and only time?
Not long after, I dreamed I was wandering along the Etruscan wall in the countryside near my house where I stepped into a roadside chapel by walking straight through a wall. I have often wondered if Lido’s night-traveling is akin to this bizarre dream I had. But my mind distinguished this as a dream not to be confused with waking reality. Perhaps in Lido’s experience these two modes of being are not separate. Or perhaps he carries his waking consciousness into his dreaming.
My father, a rational scientist, had dreams of leaving his body in the weeks before he died. He’d fly around his room at the hospice and whenever he got tired, he’d find himself in bed. He knew it was a dream, he said, but it felt so real and he quite enjoyed it.
Lido died several years ago. Not long after, an Etruscan tomb was discovered under the cellar beneath his house.
An earlier version of this essay appeared in Tiferet Magazine.
Other news: A giveaway of Signatures in Stone is hosted
on Tasting Life Twice
I have had some interesting feedback from readers of An Astral Traveler in Tuscany. Friends of Lido’s have shared memories of his magic— removing the evil eye from a flock of sheep or predicting which contrada would win the Palio in Siena. I have also been informed that 12 tombs were found under his house. Friends have shared vivid dreams of flying outside their bodies, and sent links to medical studies of out of the body experiences . Thanks to all for sharing
What a wonderful story. My husband’s great-great grandfather Domenico was a dowser as well. He came from a small town in Piemonte and converted to Mormonism in the mid-19th century. After he crossed the plains with the pioneers, he did dowsing in his small Utah town.