"La Strega Bianca" translates to "The White Witch" in English. While the term is a more of a modern interpretation, strega historically carried negative connotations due to Catholic influences; its association with benevolent folk healers emerged more prominently in later centuries. During the Middle Ages and the early modern period (14th–18th centuries), women with extensive knowledge of herbs, healing, and spiritual practices were often labeled streghe (witches), sometimes persecuted during witch trials.

However, in rural communities, many of these healers were respected figures, known as guaritrici (healers) or santone (a term more commonly applied to male spiritual healers). The role of these folk healers was integral to community life, reflecting a deep understanding of local plants and their medicinal properties (Pummarol). Naples had a strong tradition of folk magic (fattucchieria) and healing, but so did regions like Sicily, Calabria, and Abruzzo. It was commonplace for the magare (folk witches) of Calabria to blend Catholic prayers with ancient rituals. These traditions, deeply rooted in pre-Christian and Greco-Roman healing practices, were preserved through oral transmission and local apprenticeships.

By the 19th and 20th centuries, these healers continued to serve as intermediaries between folk medicine and organized religion, often incorporating Christian symbols into their practices. Today, their legacy persists in Italian folk healing traditions, herbal medicine, and modern reinterpretations of stregoneria as a blend of historical wisdom and spiritual healing

(Art of the Root).

La Strega Bianca Wildcrafts & Wellness is an homage to my great great Aunt Rosaria Perrino. She immigrated to America from Ariano Irpino (formerly known as Ariano di Puglia) in the region of Campania, Southern Italy, in 1905. My grandma said people whispered, calling her a white witch (her words) -- knowing now that was an old world, colloquial way of understanding such a folk healer.

Auntie Rosaria was responsible, as my grandma recounted, for coming to her bedside every day for months to rub herbs and oils, while chanting or singing over her legs, as she was bedridden with polio (this was in the late 1930s). My grandma said she did this faithfully every day and after some time, she thinks it was about 6 months or so, she was able to get out of bed and walk again, with no major lasting damage.

This story always fascinated me to no end; how magical and wonderful.

Fast forward almost 100 years later, I found myself in need of healing, mainly from cancer, and physical and emotional traumas accumulated over time and held deep within the body and mind. I turned to herbs first, by the recommendations of my own spiritual counselors.

Later, I discovered the forest in ways I hadn’t regarded before, to forage and make my own medicines. This inspiration was primarily practical at first, as a means to make taking herbs more affordable and therefore continually possible, as well as to teach myself skills that had been lost to time for many in my generation.

It was only then that I remembered and reconnected to this story about my Aunt Rosaria in a new way. Through this enhanced perspective, I felt happy at the thought, feeling like it is a birthright to bring into the present day, an ancestral reckoning, and guidance to return to the deeply familiar.

Little did I know that this guidance back to ancestral ways would, upon hindsight, be seen in all the little weird potions I made as a child, and the magical beliefs that have never left me. This has also prompted an excavation into my family’s ancestry, which is in itself a potent medicine for healing. As the circle comes full circle, we are all on this journey home together.

I am not a clinical herbalist as I do not work with clients or advise people on the use of herbs and plant medicines. My joy has been the experimenting with what grows around me; Learning about the plants and their medicine for myself, and then sharing their wisdom and magic with friends and family. I see this learning and sharing as an invitation to return to the natural world, to connect with a deeper understanding of simpler, more holistic ways of being guided by our body’s intuition - and, ultimately to regain connection to all that’s around us.

Even so, I have trained in-person with clinical herbalists in the Pacific Northwest, taken a number of online classes, courses, and workshops, attended a variety of online conferences, and in-person knowledge share gatherings, as well as being doctored by Native elders, who've taught me a bit about medicinal plants.

I am now working on integration, looking at medicine ways through the lens of my ancestry: seeking resonance with family histories, ancestors, and unfolding the Southern Italian folk healing ways of my great aunt and those that came before her. My education will be lifelong.