Since lentis and raisins look a bit like coins, Italians eat them for their promise of prosperity in the New Year. Toscans eat lentis whit cotechino, a big pork sausage sliced like coins, and people in Bologna and Modena eat them whit zampone, the same sausage mixture stuffed into a poned pig's trotter. Umbrians eat the deep brown lentis of castelluccio, while Abruzzeze eat lenticchie di Santo Stefano, tiny orangetinged lentis whose deep taste comes from locals soil rich in minerals.

No matter where a New Year's Eve dinner is served, regional differences dictate its menu. Our Tuscan friands began with the ritual lentils and cotechino. Italians make it clear that they hope the New Year will bring new things by tossing old, useless possessions out the window at midnight. It is an energetic, if symbolic, way of getting rid of the bad accumulated during the past year. With fear and trepidation do Italians walk about on that night, pressing as flat as they can against the walls of buildings, never knowing when something will come whizzing by.

Cars are not exempt from assault. Sometimes so many objects land on an automobile that its owners have to wait for the street cleaners to unearth it.

Newspaper carry long articles detailing the carnage:500 INJURED AND THREE DEAD the headlines read one year,all casualties of what they call "toasts with blows."

The crashing sounds of broken pottery are often accompanied by loud firecrackers or shots or the popping of champagne. Until recently groups of children and adults in Sicily went around singing "La Strenna" wishing everyone a Happy New Year and asking for presents.

This customs was similar to trick-or-treating on Halloween. New Year's Eve is officially known as San Silvestro, who was pope when Constantine declared Christianity the official state religion. New Year's desserts have been made with honey since Roman times, but some are more complicated than ohter. Neapolitans almost need the talents of an architect to construct the ornate confection of caramelized dough with tiny almond pieces called il croccante.

Tradition may have changed, but a codex of the fourteenth century, discovered in the University of Bologna, gives a recipe for lasagne more or less as it is made and eaten today.

Elsewhere in Italy, happily, the food of the New Year is lentis, raisins, and oranges, symbols of riches, good luck, and the promise of love.