Nicola Valletta and the Cicalata sul fascino, the book of jettatura

In 1787 a little book appeared in Naples that was destined to become the classic text on jettatura: the Cicalata sul fascino volgarmente detto jettatura, a «chatter on fascination commonly called jettatura». Its author was Nicola Valletta, a jurist and professor at the Neapolitan university, a man of wide classical learning. The title already declares the tone: in the Italian literary tradition a cicalata was a playful discourse, a learned chat on a curious or bizarre subject. And yet many readers took the book seriously.

The author

Nicola Valletta was born in 1750 at Arienzo, in the Terra di Lavoro, and died in Naples in 1814. He taught law at the Neapolitan university and wrote legal works, but also verse and occasional pieces. He belonged to that class of intellectuals who enlivened the capital of the Kingdom in the second half of the eighteenth century, frequenting academies and salons where everything was discussed, from legislative reform to the curiosities of manners, with a marked taste for brilliant conversation.

A half-serious treatise

In the Cicalata Valletta gathers with great erudition the ancient testimonies on fascination, quoting Greek and Latin authors, Church Fathers and modern writers of treatises, and applies them to the contemporary figure of the jettatore. He discusses how one might recognise him, what effects he would produce and what remedies were set against him, from the hand horns to the coral horn. All this in a style that alternates apparent seriousness with wit, deliberately leaving the reader unsure how far the author believed what he wrote.

This ambiguity is the key to the book. Valletta presents himself neither as a credulous man nor as a demolisher of superstition: he adopts the pose of the man of the world who knows how questionable jettatura is, but prefers not to take any chances. It is the same attitude that Neapolitan culture would later sum up in the proverbial formula «it isn't true, but I believe it», and it makes the Cicalata such a revealing document of the mentality of its time.

Reception and interpretations

The Cicalata went through several reprints and became a point of reference for anyone writing about jettatura in the nineteenth century. Foreign travellers and writers, drawn by the local colour of Naples, knew its contents either directly or through salon conversation. The book was taken up in anthologies and studies of Neapolitan manners, and Valletta's name came to be identified with the subject itself, as happens to authors who are the first to define a theme.

In the twentieth century Ernesto De Martino returned to Valletta in Sud e magia, regarding him as an exemplary witness of the ambiguous attitude of eighteenth-century Neapolitan culture towards magic. For De Martino the Cicalata was not a mere curiosity, but the document of a crisis: that of an Enlightenment unable to turn its own criticism into a complete liberation from traditional fears.

Rereading the Cicalata sul fascino today means entering a Neapolitan salon of the late eighteenth century, where people laugh at superstition and respect it at the same time. Valletta's book is a small classic in the history of beliefs, because it shows clearly that the evil eye and jettatura were not only popular phenomena, but also cultural constructions discussed, written and printed by the elites.