The Ciciu of Villar

The story

There is a wood, above Villar San Costanzo, where the trees are taller than the stones and the stones are stranger than the trees.

Whoever enters it for the first time stops. Among the chestnuts and the red leaves, in the middle of the path and a little further on, scattered like guests at a party, you can see figures. Columns of reddish earth, as tall as a person or two, and on top of each, in balance, a dark boulder. They look like mushrooms of stone. They look like people. It seems, looking closely, that someone has stopped suddenly in the middle of a run.

Their name is Ciciu, which in Piedmontese means "puppets", and every old person in the valley will tell you their story.

The most famous begins a very long time ago, when Diocletian ruled in Rome and Christians were persecuted.

There was a Roman soldier called Costanzo. He belonged to the Theban Legion, and in those years, between 303 and 305, he was on the mountain above Villar. It was there that they chased him. He climbed towards the woods, where the trees are thick and there is always somewhere to hide.

Behind him, though, were the soldiers.

He could hear them. He heard the clatter of armour, the shouted orders, the branches breaking. He ran up the slope with his breath burning, and for a while he thought he had made it. Then, in front of him, the mountain ended. There was no more path, and behind him he could hear the footsteps.

Costanzo stopped. He stayed a moment motionless, with his back to the rock, and then he turned.

They say he was not afraid. They say he looked at the soldiers one by one, as you look at people you know, and raised his voice so that the whole mountain would hear. He began with these words: "O incorrigible wicked ones..."

Then he said nothing more that can be repeated.

The wood stayed silent. For a moment even the wind could not be heard. Then the air changed, as before a storm. And when the soldiers, about a hundred of them, all together, tried to take a step, they found that their feet no longer moved.

A grey cold rose from their legs to their chests. The armour turned to stone, the hands turned to stone, the faces froze with their eyes still wide open. In a few moments there was no more clatter of iron.

This is how the Ciciu were born, they say: a troop of soldiers left standing for ever in the wood, with a boulder for a helmet.

But in Villar there are those who tell another story.

Once there was a boy, dirt poor, who was still called Costanzo but was not a soldier. He wanted to build a church. By day he could not, because he worked for a master. So he built it at night, with the master's oxen, and to carry the stones from one bank of the river Maira to the other he used a magic bridge, which appeared and vanished on command.

Some envious men, however, discovered him. They went to meet him in the dark, with branches of broom in their hands, to threaten him. Costanzo did not defend himself by force. He took a handful of sand and threw it towards them. In an instant the envious men became stone statues. The church that boy built is still there, and bears his name.

And then there is a third voice, that of the grandmothers, which speaks of the masche. The masche are the witches of these mountains, and at night, they say, they gathered in the wood for their sabbath. One night a hurricane arrived and broke up the party. The masche did not have time to flee, and stayed petrified where they stood. Or, according to others, they themselves made the Ciciu, at night, one by one, without anyone seeing them.

Three stories, and all have the same ending: figures of stone, in the middle of the wood, waiting.

But if you ask those who study such things, the figures have another story to tell, and it is no less beautiful.

A very, very long time ago, at the end of the last ice age, a stream called Faussimagna left its bed. It came down from Monte San Bernardo carrying a mass of reddish earth, rich in iron, and deposited it where the wood is today. Later great dark boulders fell down from the mountain and settled on top of that earth. Then the river dropped, the rain began to wash the earth away, and the earth, where it lay under a boulder, was not touched.

The boulder acts as an umbrella. All around, the rain digs, day after day, year after year, until a single column remains, with its stone hat. When the hat falls, nobody protects the column any more, and slowly it too disappears.

A study of the year 2000 found at least two generations of columns: some have already been born and finished, others are still growing.

So today, among the trees, the Ciciu wait. Soldiers, witches or mushrooms of earth, who can say. One thing is certain: every drop of rain that falls on that wood is changing them, slowly, without anyone noticing.

Try going to see them, on a sunny day. And look closely at the boulder on top of each column.

It looks as if it were holding a roof over someone.