"the houses were made of barley sugar and cakes, the streets were paved with pastry, and the shops supplied goods for nothing". According to Herman Pleij, Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life (2003): Cockaigne was a "medieval peasant’s dream, offering relief from backbreaking labor and the daily struggle for meager food." Traditions A Neapolitan and Southern Italian tradition, extended to Southern Italian diaspora communities and other Latin culture countries, is the Cockaigne pole (Italian: cuccagna; Spanish: cucaña), a horizontal or vertical pole with a prize (like a ham) at one end. The pole is covered with grease or soap and planted during a festival. Then, daring people try to climb the slippery pole to get the prize. The crowd laughs at the often failed attempts to hold on to the pole. Legacy Placenames The Dutch village of Kockengen in the province of Utrecht is likely to have been named after Cockaigne by the local clergy, who established farms and peat-cutting settlements in the area. The Canadian town of Cocagne, New Brunswick, at the mouth of the Cocagne river, was named after Cockaigne. The English Village of Cockayne Hatley in Bedfordshire was named after the Cokayne family, who took possession of the land in 1417. Literature "Ego sum abbas Cucaniensis" ("I am the Abbot of Cockaigne") is one of the drinking songs (Carmina potatoria) found in the 13th-century manuscript of Songs from Benediktbeuern, better known for its inclusion in Carl Orff's secular cantata, Carmina Burana. The Land of Toys (or Pleasure Island) from The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883) is said to be located in Cockaigne. "L'invitation au voyage", a prose-poem by the French poet Charles Baudelaire, found in his collection Paris Spleen, makes reference to the "land of Cocaigne", there envisioned as a country in keeping with Baudelaire's poetic ideals, such as silence, decorum, indolence, and artifice. He describes it as "the East of the West, the China of Europe", as he describes it as being located to the North and as being possessed of qualities thought of as being essentially "Oriental" by the Europeans of the time. “The Land of Cockaigne” is the first poem in the 2015 book “The Emperor of Water Clocks” by Yusef Komunyakaa, an American poet who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1994. James Branch Cabell in his Jurgen a comedie of justice circa 1919, has the land of Cocaigne between