Pricolici

Accounts collected in modern sources offer multiple folk etiologies for pricolici. A common moral explanation holds that malicious or violent men become pricolici after death so they may continue to harm the living; in some variants, people who were werewolves in life return after death as pricolici (or as vampiric beings that take animal forms). A minority tradition recorded in survey sources also links infant feeding practices to revenant identity (a child breastfed after the mother has weaned is sometimes given among several folk causes elsewhere), but the supplied sources treat such etiologies as part of a range of local explanations rather than a single canonical origin.

The dominant description across sources presents the pricolici as always resembling a wolf or dog: unusually large, fierce, and predatory canids that attack silently and unexpectedly. Modern rural reports cited in secondary accounts describe attacks by abnormally large wolves identified by villagers as pricolici. A minority, uncertain variant describes a bi-morphic werewolf-like form that can walk upright on two legs, but that description is not consistently attested in the sources and is marked as less certain.

Sources describe pricolici as nocturnal, violent revenants that continue predatory behaviour after death; they are associated with wolves, dogs and other nocturnal hunters (owls, bats) and linked conceptually to vampire-like activity. Some accounts state they have the ability to transform into animals or ordinary people, while other material emphasizes that when manifest as a revenant they are characteristically lupine. Folkloric treatments therefore present a degree of variability: pricolici may be counted among shapeshifters in some narratives, yet in common identification they are noted foremost for their wolf- or dog-like attacks and post-mortem hostility.