Affascino in Southern Italy: folk practices through anthropology
Secret formulas passed on at Christmas, oil on water, expert women: the evil eye in Southern Italy as recorded by Pitrè and by later ethnographers.
In southern Italy the evil eye has many names: affascino in Campania and Lucania, uocchie or malocchiu in other areas, jettatura in Sicily as in Naples. For centuries a system of domestic practices, entrusted above all to women, developed around this belief. Folklorists and anthropologists documented them from the nineteenth century onwards, and their descriptions allow us today to understand them as cultural phenomena, without turning them into instructions to follow.
Pitrè and the Sicilian record
The great collector of Sicilian traditions was Giuseppe Pitrè, a physician from Palermo who lived from 1841 to 1916. In the twenty-five volumes of the Biblioteca delle tradizioni popolari siciliane, published between 1871 and 1913, he recorded songs, tales, proverbs, festivals and beliefs, including those connected with the harmful gaze. In particular the four volumes of Usi e costumi, credenze e pregiudizi del popolo siciliano, from 1889, and the Medicina popolare siciliana, from 1896, preserve numerous testimonies.
Pitrè worked with the scruple of a philologist: he noted the exact words, the places, the variants. Thanks to him we know what the various amulets were called, which people were considered most exposed and which figures were believed able to free others from harm. The ethnographic museum that bears his name, founded in Palermo in 1909, still preserves many objects connected with these beliefs and with the everyday life of the island.
The secret of the formulas
A recurring feature, reported in many parts of the South, concerns the transmission of the formulas against the evil eye. According to tradition, these words could not be taught at just any time: in many villages it was believed that they should be passed on only on Christmas night, usually from an older woman to a younger one, and that revealing them outside that context would cancel their efficacy. Secrecy guaranteed the value of the knowledge and the prestige of whoever kept it.
The formulas themselves mixed Christian prayers, invocations of saints and fragments of an older language. Anthropologists have seen in them an example of syncretism, in which official religion and popular magic coexist in the same gesture. Church authorities often regarded them with suspicion, but never managed to root them out, partly because those who practised them considered themselves good believers and saw no contradiction.
Oil and water
The best-known practice, described by many ethnographers, is the observation of a few drops of oil poured into a dish of water, from whose behaviour the expert drew a verdict on the presence of affascino. The rite had at once a function of symbolic diagnosis and of reassurance: it made an invisible harm visible and offered a shared language for speaking of malaise, conflict and envy within the community, without having to accuse anyone openly.
Studying these practices historically means recognising their social function without sharing their assumptions. They spoke of relations between neighbours, of fears concerning children and economic insecurity, of forms of female solidarity. The testimonies gathered by Pitrè, by De Martino and by many other researchers remain a precious heritage of the memory of southern Italy and of its popular culture.