Neapolitan jettatura: when bad luck becomes a person
From the envious evil eye to the involuntary jettatore: how jettatura arose in eighteenth-century Naples, a belief between fear, irony and theatre.
Evil eye and jettatura are often used as synonyms, but in the Neapolitan tradition they mean different things. The evil eye arises from envy or excessive admiration and is tied to a specific moment. Jettatura, on the other hand, is a permanent quality of certain people, the jettatori, who supposedly bring bad luck simply by being present, often without wishing it and without knowing it. The word comes from the verb iettare, to throw: the jettatore throws misfortune all around him.
An eighteenth-century fashion
The term and the figure of the jettatore became established in eighteenth-century Naples, the lively and populous capital of one of the largest kingdoms in Italy. Here the belief was not confined to the lower classes: nobles, magistrates, abbés and men of letters talked about it, treating it with a mixture of fear and irony. Precisely in the century of the Enlightenment, when reason was calling many superstitions into question, jettatura paradoxically became a topic of elegant conversation.
Ernesto De Martino, in Sud e magia, proposed reading this phenomenon as a compromise typical of educated Neapolitan culture: unable to believe fully in magic and at the same time unable to free itself from it entirely, it developed an ambiguous attitude made of jest and caution. Jettatura would thus be the product of an Enlightenment that remained incomplete, in a social context marked by deep uncertainty.
Portrait of the jettatore
Over time a conventional portrait of the jettatore took shape, which literature and theatre helped to fix. In the recurring descriptions he is thin, pale, dressed in dark clothes, with spectacles and a serious air, often courteous and cultivated. His presence was linked to accidents, illnesses and bad news. He was a feared figure but also a comic one, and around him anecdotes flourished that circulated in the city's salons, cafés and theatres.
Countermeasures and coexistence
Against the jettatore what was needed was not so much a rite as a series of discreet countermeasures: the horns made with the hand, preferably in secret, contact with iron, a coral horn in the pocket, a warding phrase said under one's breath. These were social rather than magical defences, which made it possible to live alongside the suspected person without breaking the rules of good manners. The result, however, was a subtle and real form of exclusion, which could weigh heavily on its victim.
It was precisely this social aspect that later literature grasped. The figure of the jettatore, marginalised for a fault he does not have, became between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the subject of stories and comedies, such as Luigi Pirandello's novella La patente or Peppino De Filippo's 1942 comedy Non è vero ma ci credo, whose title, «it isn't true but I believe it», has become a proverbial expression for an ambivalent attitude towards fortune.
Neapolitan jettatura is therefore something more than a local superstition. It is a precise historical phenomenon, born in an urban and educated environment, which reveals the ambivalent relationship between rationality and belief. Studying it means understanding how a society can laugh at its own fears without ceasing to fear them, and how bad luck can be unjustly attributed to a real person of flesh and blood.