In Naples some people come home and say good evening to an empty house: it’s for the Bella 'Mbriana

It’s almost nine on an October evening, in an apartment building in the old town. A woman climbs the last flight of stairs with a grocery bag in one hand and her keys in the other, unlocks the door, pushes it open with her hip and, before she even reaches for the light switch, says to the darkness of the hallway: “Bonasera, bella 'Mbriana.” No one answers, and no one expects anyone to. The kitchen curtain stirs slightly, because the window was left ajar; outside, on the balcony wall near the lamp, a gecko sits as still as if it were painted there. The woman sets down the bag, turns on the light, puts the water on to boil. She said hello out of good manners: in Naples you don’t walk into a home without greeting whoever is there. Even when no one is.

Who is there, for those who believe, is the Bella 'Mbriana, the kindly spirit of the house: a young woman with a serene face who almost never lets herself be seen and who, treated with courtesy, brings peace and good fortune to those who live with her. And that greeting isn’t some modern quirk: a Neapolitan scholar was already recording it in 1883, in almost the same words.

A word that comes from noon

Where the name comes from isn’t certain, but the most widespread theory is also the loveliest: 'Mbriana would be a worn-down form of meridiana, the noon hour, when the sun is highest and shadows shrink almost to nothing. That would explain why she’s a spirit of the day and not of the night: you catch a glimpse of her, tradition says, during the controra, the still hours of early afternoon when the city slows down and your head starts to feel heavy. Some people also call her Meriana or 'Mmeriana, just a step away from meridiana.

Plenty of people, after all, thought noon was an hour of spirits. In 1889 Giuseppe Pitrè, the great collector of Sicilian traditions, devoted a few pages to the “noonday demon”: in the County of Modica people believed in the malifrùsculi, invisible devils that go about making mischief in the midday hours, in summer from one to three in the afternoon; in Messina it was said that the breeze that rises around that time was the work of spirits, or the spirits themselves. If the name really does come from the meridiana, the 'Mbriana is the gentle face of that hour: the spirit who, at controra, keeps you company instead of frightening you.

The word, in any case, is old. In 1890 the scholar Gaetano Amalfi noted that Giulio Cesare Cortese — the poet Giambattista Basile recognized as the founder of literature in Neapolitan — already mentioned “la brutta e la bona 'mbriana” (the ugly and the good 'mbriana). The word really is in his books. In the short poem Micco Passaro 'nnammorato, from 1619, the nymph Arethusa is so beautiful, wise and graceful “che maie fù tale bella Mmeriana” (that never was there so fair a Mmeriana). In the novel Li travagliuse ammure de Ciullo e Perna, first printed in 1621, Perna despairs because her parents want to give her to the “chiù brutta mbriana d'hommo” (the ugliest mbriana of a man) to be found in Genoa; later on the Grand Duke, at Palazzo Pitti, can’t get over the fact that faces “d'accossì bona mmriana” (of such good mmriana) could have done what they did. There the word seems to mean a person’s air, their figure, and it could be ugly as well as lovely. In Neapolitan homes, the lovely one survived.

Before her, the Lares

It’s even harder to say where she herself comes from. Some identify her with the spirit of the hearth, others with the genius loci, the Latins’ spirit of the place. No document draws a straight line, but the kinship is suggestive. At every hearth the Romans worshiped the Lar familiaris, which the 1933 Enciclopedia Italiana entry describes as an “affectionate and benevolent spirit, who watches over the fortunes of the house and the family.” Everyone in the household honored him every morning and before the main meal; a bride, entering her husband’s house for the first time, made him a special offering; he was remembered whenever a member of the family set out on a journey or came home from one.

A thought before eating, a gesture on the threshold, respect for whoever lived in the house before us: reading those lines, you start to suspect that certain Neapolitan habits have deeper roots than they seem. But it’s a suspicion, not proof. And the idea of looking to Rome for relatives of the house spirits isn’t new: in 1883 the same scholar who recorded the greeting noted that the Romans called their household spirits Lemures (the bad ones, he specified), and that even the Russians had their Domovoi. Every people, it seems, has someone who shares the house with them.

What they wrote in the 1800s

The scholar’s name was Luigi Correra, and his article came out on April 15, 1883, in the Neapolitan journal of folk literature named, fittingly, after Giambattista Basile. He wrote mostly about the munaciello, but at one point he said: “Sometimes, though, instead of the munaciello, some houses are said to have the bella 'mbriana, who is a sort of female munaciello, a benevolent fairy; she is the aùrio of the house.” Aùrio means augury, a good omen. Then the greeting: some women of the people, coming home in the evening, “are in the habit of saying bona sera bella 'mbriana.” And finally a detail that has almost been lost today: the 'Mbriana was children’s friend and, if they had been good, on the evening of Epiphany she came down the chimney to bring them presents. A household Befana, young and beautiful.

Seven years later Gaetano Amalfi, in his Tradizioni ed usi nella penisola sorrentina, published in Giuseppe Pitrè's series, placed her among the fairies, “naturally benevolent,” the ones who “make the ugly handsome, the poor rich, the old young again.” He too had heard the greeting: “Some women of the people, coming home, greet her: ‘Bona sera, bella 'Mbriana!’ And so they win her favor.”

Correra left one last note: where neither the 'Mbriana nor the munaciello lived, other small guests brought the house good luck: the vaccarelle di San Pasquale, snakes, lizards, beetles.

Amalfi, from the Sorrento peninsula, made the list longer. Finding a tiny ant on you is a good omen, and so is a two-tailed lizard: peasant women shut it in the grain chest, convinced the grain would grow before their eyes. A butterfly that flies into the house brings good news, especially if it’s a vaccarella di San Bartolomeo, “which must never be killed.” Sweeping in the evening, on the other hand, brings bad luck. The gecko would fit perfectly in that list of small guests to be respected.

The princess who was looking for a home

In those 19th-century pages the 'Mbriana has no story: she’s simply there. It was folk storytelling that gave her one, and several versions go around, which don’t entirely agree.

In the best-known one there was a princess who lost her mind over an unhappy love and began to wander the city’s alleys like a shadow. The king her father, to protect her, rewarded with anonymous gifts the houses where his daughter was taken in. In another version the girl was abandoned at the altar just before marrying the prince she loved, a brave soldier of the king; or else — and here the storytellers aren’t sure — on the eve of the wedding she learned he had died in battle. From then on she roamed the city always dressed as a bride, through streets and alleys, even across the rooftops. In a third, where she too is left at the altar, her father isn’t a king but a very rich man, and the girl doesn’t just pass by: she likes to go into houses to spy on everyday life, and whoever offers her refreshment gets paid.

They all end the same way: a house that takes in a sad girl receives in return a gift, without knowing where it came from. Hence the good fortune tied to her presence, and the idea that the spirit still leaves presents here and there in the homes of honest people.

Amalfi had already collected a story much like it in Sorrento, where “the fairy of the Mastrogiudice house was famous.” An old local guide, one Francesco d'Aprea, told it to him like this. A Mastrogiudice, heading home, sees in the street, near the seggio, the old nobles’ loggia, a naked girl of wondrous beauty; he throws his coat over her, takes her home, has her properly dressed, and nine months later has a son by her. But she is mute: she never says a word, and no one knows who she is or how she ended up there. One day he has a great fire lit and, in front of her, pretends he’s about to throw the baby into it. The girl suddenly finds her voice and cries out for mercy: she is of royal blood, and the wedding is celebrated with great pomp. Here too, a stranger of royal blood taken into the house, and good fortune walking in the door with her.

House rules

To stay on her good side, tradition has put together a little etiquette. You greet her coming in and going out. In the old days an extra place was set for her at the table, with an empty chair so she could sit and rest. She likes order and cleanliness, and a neglected house makes her irritable. Above all she mustn’t be offended: no complaining that the house is small or dark, and if you’re thinking of moving, you talk about it outside, where she can’t hear. For anyone who starts renovating there’s even a proverb: casa accunciata, morte apparicchiata, a house fixed up, a death laid out. Because the 'Mbriana is kind, but when she takes offense the tales credit her with terrible revenge, even the death of a family member.

Then there’s the gecko. They say that if you watch her, she turns into a gecko or a butterfly; the poet Claudio Pennino, who devoted a slim volume to her, presented by Il Mattino in January 2024, adds the moth, the puff of wind, the cricket. That’s why the gecko, which hunts insects near the lamps on summer evenings, is a good-luck charm in Naples and nobody would dream of chasing it away. Who would, knowing it might be the lady of the house?

Pennino also tells two stories that say a lot about her character. A woman put a coin in a drawer and one fine day found three: she understood it was a gift from the 'Mbriana, but she told a neighbor, and when she got home she found the coins had turned to coal. Another, feeling a little too closely followed by the spirit, moved house, and some swear they heard the 'Mbriana weeping.

The fourth of May

In Naples, moving house wasn’t just something people whispered about: for a long time it was a collective ritual, with a fixed date. Giovanni Emanuele Bidera, who in 1844 wrote a Passeggiata per Napoli e contorni to describe the city “at ground level,” devotes a whole chapter to it, Il quattro maggio (The Fourth of May). Naples, he writes, is “an immense inn”: apart from a fortunate few, everyone rents. On the first of January Si loca (For rent) signs pop up everywhere, and with that sign anyone has the right to tour a family’s most private rooms. Each house is visited up to thirty times a day by chatty, nosy old women who ask a hundred questions: whether the water comes from a well or from the formale, the aqueduct pipe; whether anyone has died there; “whether the bella Mbriana or the Monacello can be seen.” And every one of them, out of civility and custom, has to be answered.

Then the day arrives. Fifty thousand porters, Bidera tells us — lazzari, servants, cobblers and farmhands from the outlying villages — move almost all of Naples in a few hours. At night the moon lights up carts piled high with household goods, and up and down the narrow stairs go men loaded with trunks, “like ants carrying grains of wheat to the anthill.” To anyone sleeping their last night in the old house, Bidera recommends leaving it a farewell, and christening the new one with “the frugal macaroni soup, as ritual requires.” And instead of rushing to hang a horseshoe or horns against the evil eye on the door, better to do as the woman of the people does, bringing along her patron saint and lighting his lamp again, “like her Greek foremothers, who carried their household gods with them.” The Lares, as you can see, come back into the house through another door.

She and 'o Munaciello

The 'Mbriana shares Neapolitan homes with a noisier neighbor. Correra described the munaciello as a dwarf with silver buckles on his shoes and a red skullcap on his head, capable of making one of his favorites rich and, right after, of stealing the case files of a poor lawyer, who found himself without his papers on the day of the hearing. When the lawyer, at his wits’ end, decided to move — to “do the fourth of May,” as people said back then — he called the porters and had everything loaded onto a cart. And on top of the load, guess who was sitting there: the munaciello, shouting happily, “Cagnammo casa!” (We’re moving!).

Almost forty years earlier, Bidera gave a more solemn definition: “It is an ancient belief that the household spirit presides over houses like the lemures of the Latins, which the common people call Monacello”; it brings good luck to those who can bear the sight of it and keep its favors secret, and turns spiteful and malicious with those who go around telling of them. And he passed on a story that begins with “it is said.” A poor, thin young man, living alone in a house in the Cilento, would see a venerable man sit down beside him every night while he studied, then suddenly vanish. One night he plucked up his courage and asked whether he was Socrates’ daemon, or his own good or evil genius. “I am the Lord of these thresholds, who protects you and admires you,” the other replied, and vanished. The young man, Bidera concludes, was Giambattista Vico. The visit can’t be verified; what is true is that Vico spent several years in the Cilento, as tutor to the sons of the Marquis Rocca in the castle of Vatolla.

So here’s the difference. The munaciello plays pranks for the fun of it, and pulls the hair of any woman who goes around telling of his favors; the 'Mbriana plays no pranks, but she takes offense. The munaciello moves with you, and laughs. The 'Mbriana stays, and weeps. On one point only do they agree: you don’t tell the neighbors about their gifts.

The Sicilian cousins

The 'Mbriana isn’t alone. In the same 1889 volume Pitrè described the Donne di fuora, who depending on the town were also called Donni di casa, Belli Signuri, Patruni di casa: beings “part witches, part fairies,” able to make people rich or poor, handsome or ugly, moved by nothing but whim. The portrait seems made to hang right next to ours. They love “cleanliness and neatness to the point of scruple”: in the houses they visit they expect to find the bed neatly made, the sheets white and fragrant, the kitchen copper gleaming, the rooms well swept. They don’t let themselves be seen, and fortunate is the one who manages to see them.

They go out on Thursday nights and slip in through keyholes; if dawn catches them, they turn into toads until the following night. That’s why in Sicily nobody kills a toad: you leave it where it is, or you gather it up, carry it into the house and give it bread and wine, sometimes bread and sugar. And woe to anyone who recognizes them and goes around telling, because they take offense and turn on whoever talked.

The gecko in Naples, the toad in Sicily; the tidy house, the secret to keep. The animal and the dialect change, not the rules.

Hanging by a golden thread

In 1982 Pino Daniele named an album after her, with a song of the same name on it and, among the musicians, Wayne Shorter and Alphonso Johnson. In his notes he wrote: “The bella 'mbriana, in Neapolitan folk tradition, is the soul of the house, a benevolent sprite that lives in symbiosis with it; she has no era, no age, but she can step in and change the course of events.” The chorus has our lady’s very greeting, “Bonasera bella 'mbriana mia,” and a line, “rieste appiso a 'nu filo d'oro,” you stay hanging by a golden thread, which in Pennino’s book becomes the image of how deeply this spirit can bind itself to people.

Good evening

The woman we met at the start, in all likelihood, knows nothing about Cortese, the Lares or the 1883 journal. She only knows that when you come home, you say hello. And that may be the most Neapolitan way of being in the world: not knowing whether anyone is listening, and greeting them anyway, so as not to slight anyone. If you’re reading these lines on a Sunday afternoon, the controra has just gone by. If the curtain moves, leave the window be.

Where we come in

We’ve gathered the rules of courtesy for the 'Mbriana, the munaciello and the janara in the guide to the Munaciello, the Bella 'Mbriana and 'a Janara. And if one night you dream of her looking out between the curtains, the guide on how to read a dream with the Smorfia will help you understand what she’s telling you.