Ebook - 7 Plants of Italian Folk Medicine and how to bring them into your life

Italian folk medicine is a collection of diverse vernacular practices belonging to the peasants of Southern Italy and the Italian diaspora. The Italian diaspora in North America and around the world has formulated their own styles of the magic and medicine of their homeland. These traditions vary from place to place but mainly include a few basics tenets from the following:

Ancestral healing techniques:

• witchcraft
• herbal medicine
• pre-pagan/indigenous animism • folk Catholicism

Plants have always been included in all of these areas as food, spiritual allies, medicine, and ritual elements. Human beings co-evolved with plants and, in fact, could not survive without them. Plants are, in a sense, our ancestors as they lived upon the Earth for at least 500 million years.

Plants have had a lot of time here to learn, adapt, and grow with the dynamic and changing conditions of life on Earth.

This ebook describes just a handful of the plants that are a part of Italian culture, both in the diaspora and Southern Italy, and a little bit about their use. The best thing about plant medicine is that it’s so accessible and simple, yet potent. All cultures on Earth used plants as their medicine and all cultures were plant based.

Our culture seems removed from these practices, but when we think about it, plants are still a major part of our society. The entire world is fed by plants or by those that are fed by plants. We just don’t pay much attention to them. Some of the plants listed here are very common and you probably already have some of them in your spice cupboard.

This booklet includes a brief description of seven common herbs used in Italian Folk Medicine along with both their English and Italian names.

The last section is list of simple ways to bring them into your life!

Benedizioni,
Lisa