Barbanera and the others: a history of lunaries and almanacs
From medieval calendars to the Barbanera of Foligno, from Frate Indovino to Franklin's almanac: a history of popular lunaries, saints and forecasts.
For many families, until a few decades ago, the lunario hanging in the kitchen was the most consulted book after the prayer book. Small, cheap and updated every year, it contained the phases of the Moon, the saints' days, the fairs, the weather forecasts and advice for farm work. Its very name recalls that the popular calendar was first and foremost a lunar calendar, built around the appearance and disappearance of the crescent in the sky.
From manuscripts to print
The ancestors of the lunaries are the calendars of medieval manuscripts, which accompanied books of hours and computus treatises with tables of movable feasts and lunations. With the invention of printing these tools became mass-market products. By the end of the fifteenth century annual almanacs were spreading, with the conjunctions and oppositions of the luminaries, eclipses and astrological predictions, often signed by physicians and university professors.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the lunario took on the popular form we know, sold by pedlars at fairs and markets. Alongside the astronomical information there appeared anecdotes, riddles, household tips and weather forecasts for the whole year. Successful lunaries arose in many Italian cities, often tied to an imaginary character who guaranteed their identity and continuity over time.
Barbanera and Frate Indovino
The most famous Italian lunario is the Barbanera, born in Foligno in the eighteenth century and linked to the figure of a wise astronomer with a long black beard who, according to tradition, lived in the mountains of Umbria. The first known almanac bearing this name dates from 1762. In 2015 the historical collection of Barbanera almanacs, from 1762 to 1962, was inscribed by UNESCO in the Memory of the World register, in recognition of its documentary value.
In the twentieth century another calendar established itself and entered millions of homes, Frate Indovino, founded in 1946 in Perugia by a Capuchin friar, Father Mariangelo da Cerqueto. With its illustrations and proverbs, it has carried the format of the old lunaries down to our own day: the phases of the Moon, the saints of the day, advice for the vegetable garden and folk wisdom, all in simple and familiar language.
Almanacs of Europe and America
Similar phenomena spread across Europe and the New World. In England the astrological almanacs of the seventeenth century were among the best-selling books. In the American colonies Benjamin Franklin published Poor Richard's Almanack from 1732 to 1758, famous for its aphorisms, and in 1792 Robert B. Thomas founded The Old Farmer's Almanac, still printed every year and known for its long-range weather forecasts, based on a method kept confidential.
The lunario also entered literature. Giacomo Leopardi, in his Operette morali, imagined a Dialogue between an Almanac Seller and a Passer-by, in which a pedlar offers his «new lunaries» for the coming year and a passer-by asks him whether the new year will be happier than those gone by. In a few lines the almanac becomes a symbol of the human hope for a better future, always renewed and always disappointed.
Lunaries are today collectors' items and precious sources for historians, who read in them the daily life, fears and hopes of entire generations. Their forecasts had no scientific basis, but their success shows how far the Moon, a measure of time visible to all, was the centre around which the organisation of the year revolved.