The holidays are over and we are back in Genoa. However, to put away the tree and all the other Christmas decorations, we decided to wait until after the visit of 'la Befana'.
In Italy, this old (and I must say, scary looking) woman visits the houses of all the children on Epiphany Eve (the evening before the 6th of January) and brings them gifts. Children hang a sock near the chimney, through which she is believed to enter (sounds familiar?), and hope La Befana will fill it with sweet candies and not with lumps of coal (black candy that looks like coal). La Befana, luckily, deemed Auro too young to have candy, so she filled his sock with small toys!
Now that all of Auro's important 'visitors' (Saint-Nicholas on the 6th of December, Babbo Natale on the 25th of December and La Befana on the 6th of January) have left, each back to his own magical world, I am ready to put away the Christmas tree and start looking forward to warmer weather (because, everyone who claims that Genoa is a warm place in winter is soooo very wrong!).