'O Gran Cabalista and the assistito: when every dream in Naples became a number

Saturday morning, in a vascio in the old town — the basso, the ground-floor room that opens straight onto the street and serves as kitchen, bedroom and parlor all at once — the fire isn’t lit yet and the woman of the house is already telling last night’s dream. She dreamed of her mother, dead for years. Her mother was talking, and crying. The neighbor, standing in the doorway with her hands still wet with soapsuds, doesn’t even have to think: the dead; and if she was talking, the dead who speaks; and if she was crying, weeping. Three images, three numbers.

Then the capera comes by, the hairdresser who does the hair of the women in the alley for a penny, and she brings the numbers of her other customers. The husband has his own: a gentleman who “knows the numbers” gave them to him in the street, for a couple of lire. There’s no money in the house, so they do what they do every Saturday: whatever can be pawned gets pawned.

Around four in the afternoon a boy runs to the nearest lotto office, comes back out of breath, plants himself at the mouth of the alley and shouts out the numbers one after another. The bolder women stand in their doorways; the bashful ones stay inside, straining to hear. Then, in the words of someone who was there: “Universal silence: everyone turns pale.”

We pieced the scene together ourselves, but nearly every piece of it comes from two chapters of Il ventre di Napoli (“The Belly of Naples”), the book Matilde Serao published in 1884: the capera, “the great mouthpiece of the numbers,” the running urchin, the bashful women behind the door, the Smorfia that working-class women know “by heart.” For six days, Serao wrote, “every week the people of Naples dream their great dream of happiness all over again”: a clean house, a high white bed, meat every day. “At four in the afternoon, on Saturday, the disappointment is deep, the desolation knows no bounds: but on Sunday morning the imagination bounces back, restored, and the weekly dream begins again.”

From Genoa to Naples, between bans and ducats

The lotto, truth be told, is Genoese: it grew out of the gambling on the five noblemen whom the Republic, starting in 1576, drew by lot twice a year to renew its government. People called it the “seminario game,” after the name of the urn. Genoa tried to ban it, then in 1644 made it legal and leased it out to contractors.

In the 1600s and 1700s the game spread to the other Italian states, and in many of them, Naples included, it changed its face: instead of candidates for public office, the Enciclopedia Italiana tells us, the urn held the names of “poor girls of marrying age,” and the five whom fortune favored received a sum toward their dowry.

It reached Naples around 1680 and was abolished after just five years, because of the brawls and violence it set off. It came back in 1713, was suspended again and allowed back again, because giving it up cost too much: in 1771 it brought the kingdom 560,000 ducats. A decree of August 6, 1839, put the “royal lotteries” in order, with a draw every week.

Somewhere in between there’s a story people tell every Christmas, and it should be taken for what it is: a tradition. In 1734, the story goes, King Charles of Bourbon wanted the lotto under state control, while the Dominican Father Gregorio Maria Rocco considered it immoral; the compromise was to ban it during the holidays, and the Neapolitans brought it into their homes instead: that, supposedly, is how tombola was born. Historians point out that the numbers and the cards already existed; but the legend says something true: in Naples, there was no shutting the lotto out the door.

The draw: judges, priests and the evil eye

What a draw looked like in the mid-1800s comes from an unlikely witness: Charles Dickens, in Pictures from Italy, the book of his Italian travels published in London in 1846. The lotto, he noted, brought the government an immense revenue and spread a taste for gambling among “the poorest of the poor”: very handy for the State’s coffers, and ruinous for them.

The draw took place every Saturday at four, in the Tribunal; and in Naples, since the 1500s, the courts and the prisons had been housed in Castel Capuano. Dickens describes a big room as musty as an old cellar and as damp as a dungeon, the judges seated at a horseshoe-shaped table and, behind the president, the Capo Lazzarone, a ragged man of the people put there as a sort of people’s tribune, to make sure everything was above board. While they wait, people ask the child who is to draw the numbers how old he is, how many brothers he has, how old his father and mother are, whether he has any moles, and how many, and where: anything might come in handy for the next draw. In comes an old judge everyone fears, because he’s said to carry the evil eye; in comes the priest, who blesses the box and the child with holy water. The other numbers come out with the same ceremony, but with no blessing: one blessing does for the whole multiplication table. The Capo Lazzarone has played everything he had, and at the last number he raises his eyes to the ceiling, as if to scold his patron saint. Where the winners are, Dickens remarks, nobody knows.

A few decades later, in Serao’s day, the draw was held on Saturdays in the Palazzo dell'Impresa, a stone’s throw from Via Santa Chiara, with the crowd packed into the courtyard. In the novel Il paese di cuccagna (“The Land of Cockayne”) the child who draws the numbers is a serragliuolo, a little boarder of the Albergo dei Poveri, the city poorhouse, who has a white wool tunic slipped on over his uniform, “because the legend of the Lotto wants the little innocent to wear the white robe of innocence.” And from the courtyard, as the urn turns, the cry goes up: “Spin, spin, old fellow!”

The cabala, or the art of combining numbers

The Treccani dictionary defines the lotto cabala as a “complex series of arithmetical operations by which one claims to guess the numbers that will be drawn,” and the cabalist as “one who, with the cabala, claims to guess the future or the lotto numbers.” The word that matters is claims.

The cabala had its books. Over the centuries the Calabrian astronomer Rutilio Benincasa, author of an Almanacco perpetuo printed in Naples in 1593, was credited with tables for guessing the draws, nearly all of them apocryphal; and almanacs filled up with “cabalette,” little verses and riddles that promised numbers. In Dickens’s day every lotto office kept a printed book, a sort of “Universal Lottery Diviner,” in which every accident and every circumstance had its number beside it. When an event struck everyone, everyone played the same numbers, and the government, not wanting to take the risk, closed them: after a fire in the royal palace, he recounts, playing those numbers was forbidden. Serao lists the cabalistic weeklies of her Naples, ten lire a year, with wonderful titles: il vero amico, il tesoro, il fulmine, il rivelatore, il corno d'abbondanza — the true friend, the treasure, the thunderbolt, the revealer, the horn of plenty. “The cabala exists more for the upper classes than for the lower,” she noted, “but it trickles down to them”: it was practiced by pensioners, who “study the necromantic science of the lotto, play desperately and always have their pension book in pawn.”

In Il paese di cuccagna, serialized between 1889 and 1891, the cabalists meet every week in the drawing room of a marquis come down in the world: an old lawyer, a doctor, a professor who used to be a priest, a stockbroker and the owner of a lotto office. They talk in low voices, in a jargon the marquis’s daughter hears as “the language of madmen,” made of daydreams “that have the false, precise and fascinating look of mathematics.” They throw in the lawyer’s face the sixty lire a month he pays a cobbler, Cifariello, to stop resoling shoes and work out the cabala instead, written “in charcoal, on a dirty scrap of paper.” “What is it?” the girl asks the old maid, the wisest person in the house. “Nothing. They’re talking about the numbers.” “They’re quarreling, I think…” “Saturday night they’ll make up…” “How?” “Because none of them will win a thing.”

'O Gran Cabalista, in short, isn’t a man with a first and last name: he’s a type, like certain stock characters of the comic stage. But behind the type there were real people, and Serao had seen them.

The assistito, who talked with the spirits

Alongside the cabalist, who calculated the numbers, there was the one who claimed to receive them ready-made. Treccani records him like this: “in Naples, an a. (man or woman), a person believed capable of guessing the lotto numbers through occult power.” That’s the assistito, literally “the assisted one”: assisted by the spirits. Serao gives him no quarter: “a pale convulsionary who eats a lot, who fakes hallucinations or really has them, who doesn’t work, who speaks in riddles,” and who lives off the people who revere him. He nested in middle-class homes, and through maids and washerwomen his fame trickled down into the alleys, until he went about the streets “always surrounded by four or five people who court him and study his every word.”

In the novel the marquis’s assistito, don Pasqualino, answers in riddles: “It’s raining, but the sun will come out at midnight.” Until one stormy Friday night the cabalists, desperate by now, lock him in a room to wring “the sure numbers” out of him, and he starts sobbing like a child.

It’s a novel, but Serao knew what she was talking about. In Il ventre di Napoli she writes that the people’s true providence was the monk: “The monk knows the numbers: this is dogma.” If he doesn’t tell them, it’s because the Lord has forbidden it; if he tells them and they don’t come out, the player’s faith fell short; if he tells them and they do come out, he’s in trouble. People waited for him in the street, at the church door and the convent gate, and even went as far as kidnapping him: “These things have happened.” And when, to save himself, he had his superior send him off to another town, people said the Madonna had taken him away. Dickens, passing through, had noticed it too: people with a gift for dreaming fortunately were in great demand, he wrote, and there were priests constantly favored with visions of the numbers.

Friday night at the lotto office

If Saturday was draw day, Friday was the day to play. In Il paese di cuccagna Serao opens the doors of a lotto office on Via Toledo, at the corner of Vico Nunzio: a shop blazing with gaslight, a big wooden counter closed off by a wire grille with three windows, and behind it the owner, don Crescenzo, with two clerks everyone calls “the boys,” even though one of them is seventy. “The playing starts faintly on Friday morning, grows through the afternoon, and in the evening becomes a river in flood.” In come the maids who, their work done, slip out to play before bed; the drivers of the hired carriages, who climb down from the box and wait their turn whip in hand; the young men who dash over between one act and the next at the Teatro dei Fiorentini; the cabalists from the cafés.

Not even the people behind the grille were safe. Don Crescenzo gives the cabalists credit and then, to plug the hole, starts playing himself, until the Intendant of Finance summons him: his payments come up short every week, and “the State does not give credit.” “You play too, and on credit,” the official tells him. “To win it back, Excellency…” “An honest lotto keeper never plays. The lotto is an immorality, in citizens…” “So the State is immoral too?” “The State cannot be immoral, remember that.”

Saturday’s bill

Then there’s the other side. Between Friday night and Saturday morning, Serao writes, workers got a day’s pay in advance, maids skimmed from the grocery money, and whatever could be pawned was pawned. The blackest misery wasn’t saying you hadn’t had lunch, but saying: “Nun m'aggio potuto jucà manco nu viglietto” (I couldn’t even manage to play a single ticket); and “whoever hears it is frightened.” Those who had only a couple of coins took them to the gioco piccolo, the underground lotto: a woman with a ledger hidden under her skirt, a promise written in pencil on a scrap of paper. Thursday, Friday and Saturday, she noted, were the days of pawning at the Monte di Pietà and of usury: “the true cancer that is killing it.”

The very next chapter is titled “Usury.” A woman needs five lire for the rent and goes to donna Carmela, who lends cu a credenza, that is, on credit: she gets four and a half, because the interest, “two soldi per lira,” is paid up front, and the loan lasts eight days. The eight days go by, the five lire aren’t there, and another week’s interest has to be paid; then another, and another still. On Fridays and Saturdays, Serao explains, the public pawn banks can’t keep up, “because the Neapolitan people must play the lotto,” and people pour into the private agencies. “Every alley has its donna Carmela, every street has its donna Raffaela, every corner of every square has its licensed agency.”

There’s a shoeshine man who has played the same ticket for thirty years, inherited from his father along with the shoeshine box: “an ambo had come up, three or four times, in thirty years; the terno never.” And there’s the line where Serao had already said it all: “The lotto is the firewater of Naples.”

And there’s a short story, Terno secco, collected in 1896 in the volume All'erta, sentinella!, that hurts more than any exposé. A lady who lives on English and French lessons shares a tiny, very poor apartment with her daughter. One Saturday morning the maid, Tommasina, making the bed, finds a slip of paper under the pillow with three numbers written by hand. She plays them, tells everyone about them, and half the neighborhood plays them too. Only zì Domenico, another shoeshine man, doesn’t believe it: he stays faithful to what “men of science, of mathematics” say. All three come out, and he shrugs: “Coincidence, Excellency, coincidence.” Lots of people win, except the lady, who hadn’t played them. Her daughter presses her until she understands: the only lira her mother had, she had given to her, for drawing paper. “Forgive me, Mamma, forgive me, Mamma!”

Il paese di cuccagna is the same indictment in the form of a novel: twenty chapters in which families of every class go under, one week after another. There’s the pastry maker Cesare Fragalà, a good and honest man, who leaves the lotto office one Friday night remembering that he took on “his first usurious debt” that day and emptied the shop’s drawers; a few chapters later the pastry shop is going bankrupt, his wife hands him her jewels, and the two of them kneel before the Madonna to pray: “Lead us not into temptation…” The novel ends with the marquis kneeling on the threshold of his daughter’s room, “like old Lear before the body of sweet Cordelia.”

From the novel to the stage

The theater turned it into comedy, which in Naples is a serious way of saying things. In Non ti pago (“I Won’t Pay You”), which Eduardo De Filippo first staged in 1940, Ferdinando Quagliuolo has inherited a lotto office from his father, plays without luck and climbs up on the rooftops with his helper to read the shapes of the clouds. When his dead father appears in a dream to his employee and gives him numbers that then come out, Ferdinando refuses to pay: the deceased, he insists, got the address wrong and went to the old family home, where the employee now lives. In 1942 it was made into a film directed by Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia. The curse Ferdinando hurls at the employee, turning to his father’s portrait, wasn’t in the first version: it was born for the film and then made its way into the script. And in 2019 Il paese di cuccagna took the stage too, at the Teatro Stabile di Napoli, directed by Paolo Coletta.

What’s left of the dream

You don’t see cabalists or assistiti anymore, and mathematics has always had its say: the lotto is a “strongly unfair” game, and no cabala has ever seen inside the urn.

What remains is the Smorfia, which for Serao was the lotto’s “first literary form,” “rudimentary, illiterate, founded on oral tradition like certain fairy tales and certain legends.” That’s its loveliest side: a dictionary of images for telling dreams out loud, for putting a name to fear, to loss, to the dead who come back to our minds at night. The woman in the basso who dreams of her mother talking and crying learned nothing about Saturday. What she did learn is how much she misses her mother. That’s what the Smorfia is for: reading a dream, not guessing a draw.

Where we come in

If you’d like to try reading one of your own dreams this way, the guide to reading a dream with the Smorfia shows you how.