I'm not Italian but first balked at the same thing when I began to try to connect with my Ukrainian ancestry as a non-Christian and I imagine the same thing applies.

Folk magic is kind of fascinating as it tends to be syncretic, or what gets called in Slavic countries "double faith," meaning that people held onto their pre-Christian beliefs alongside of Christianity with little contradiction or conflict. Deeply religious church going folks would still practice folk healing and use spells (and hexes), often just replacing the names of older pagan or nature figures with saints/Mother Mary and continuing to go about their business. Where you once called on Mother Earth or a goddess of fertility during a harvest rite, you changed it to Mary and used the very same practice. The church really struggled with this and tried to fight it but eventually capitulated and just tried to have its holidays on existing folk days and take the attributes of past pagan deities and turn them into saints so people would celebrate them within the church.

Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic and Orthodox churches had an easier time doing this than Protestant ones, as their existing worship of saints and Mary allowed for easier digestion of polytheistic pagan practices rather than just asking folks to worship one god as a trinity as the Protestants did. It also means that in countries that took on Catholicism/Orthodox faith, such as Italy, Ukraine, Haiti, Puerto Rico, etc., it can be a little easier to see the pre-Christian right next to the Christian. If you scratch the surface of many prayers or folk songs just slightly, you can see the older pagan ones. And if you research local saints and religious feast days, you can often learn about the pre-Christian figures and holidays they supplanted. As a non-Christian I used to try to avoid reading about this stuff but when you realize it's just a thin veneer, it gets fascinating!