He moves your keys, leaves coins, and woe to anyone who tells: the story of 'O Munaciello

Picture a kitchen in an alley of the old town, on a winter evening. A pot on the stove, fogged-up windows, the radio turned low. The house keys were on the sideboard, you’re sure of it: you put them there yourself, ten minutes ago. Now they’re gone. You search everywhere, you snap at whoever walks by; then, just when you’ve given up, the keys turn up in the bread box, where nobody would ever put them. Nobody apologizes, because nobody did it. From the next room, Grandma says only: “It was 'o munaciello.”

And if another evening, slipping your hand into your apron pocket, you find a coin you don’t remember putting there, there’s only one rule: you keep it, and you tell no one.

A story from 1445, told in 1881

The munaciello – monacello in Italian: the little monk – is the most famous house spirit in Naples, and he has something rare for a sprite: a birth date. Matilde Serao gave him one in her Leggende napoletane (Neapolitan Legends), published in Milan in 1881. Serao, in the solemn language of an old chronicle, begins like this: in the year 1445, “in the reign of Alfonso of Aragon,” Caterina Frezza – the Catarinella of the tale – the daughter of a cloth merchant, fell in love with “un nobile garzone,” Stefano Mariconda.

A clarification: in Serao’s text Stefano is not the poor shop boy of so many modern retellings. In old Italian, garzone simply meant a young man, and the “disparity of births” ran the other way: he was the noble one. And both families waged war on the lovers.

They met at night: Stefano climbed a “muddy, crumbling” stairway, came out onto the rooftops and, terrace after terrace, reached the little terrace where Catarinella waited for him, trembling. Until one night enemy hands seized him from behind and threw him down into the street.

Catarinella, out of her mind with grief, was taken in by a convent of nuns, and there she gave birth to a tiny baby, pale, with frightened eyes. The nuns advised her to make a vow to the Madonna so the little one would grow strong, and, to keep the vow, she dressed him in a little black-and-white monk’s habit. The child hardly grew at all, and she went on dressing him that way. People began calling him lu munaciello.

He could be seen passing through the merchants’ streets near the port, and the shopkeepers pointed him out to one another. His mother had cut him a little red hood from a scrap of crimson wool: when he wore it, meeting him was a good omen; when he wore the black one, a bad omen. And since the red one was rarely seen, he got the blame for everything: the bad air, the spoiled water in the wells, the price of bread, even the king’s new taxes.

When his mother died he was left alone; and one evening he vanished. Some said the devil had taken him; Serao also reports a darker suspicion, about the Frezza relatives. And she closes her “chronicle” by leaving it “to the prudence and wisdom of the reader” to tell “which is fable, which is truth.” Which chronicle she took the story from, for that matter, she never says.

Older than his birth certificate

But the munaciello is older than the date Serao gave him. He already appears in Giambattista Basile’s Cunto de li cunti, the fairy tales in Neapolitan printed between 1634 and 1636, which you can read in the edition edited by Benedetto Croce in 1891. In the tale of the Mortella (the Myrtle), a prince hears someone moving about in the dark room and thinks of a servant come to lighten his purse, or of “quarche monaciello pe levarele le coperte da cuollo,” some monaciello come to pull the covers off him.

In the tale of Vardiello there’s even an “inhabited” house. Vardiello, a foolish boy, ends up in the courtyard of “na casa desabetata pe lo monaciello,” a house left empty because of the monacello, and leaves his cloth with a stucco statue, promising to come back the next day for the money. The next day, since the statue won’t pay, he throws a stone at its chest: the statue breaks, and inside is a pot full of gold scudi. Vardiello runs home shouting: “Mamma, mamma, quanta lupine russe!” – so many red lupins!

His mother knows her son will tell everyone. So she sits him down in front of the door and for half an hour rains dried figs and raisins on him from the window. When Vardiello tells the judges he found the gold “quanno chiovettero passe e fico secche,” the day it rained raisins and dried figs, they’ll take him for a madman. Here too, good fortune is saved by whoever knows how to keep a secret.

Croce, in a note, describes that monaciello as “a dwarf, dressed as a priest, with a tonsure and a red scazzettella (skullcap) on his head,” whose most common prank is “pulling the covers off the bed of someone asleep.”

The well man who came up from below

There’s another explanation, more down to earth, that folklore scholars set beside Serao’s. Naples sits on top of another Naples: under the buildings run tunnels, cisterns and wells dug into the tuff, and for centuries the houses got their water from down there. Keeping the wells in order was the job of the pozzari, the well men: small, nimble men who could squeeze in where nobody else could pass.

According to this version, the pozzaro knew the way into houses from below, through the well shafts the bucket was lowered down. If the owner didn’t pay him, he paid himself, carrying off some valuable object; and sometimes those very objects ended up as gifts for his lovers, whose houses he entered the same way. That, says the legend, is why the munaciello steals a little and gives a little.

It’s a theory, not a document, but it explains a lot: the small stature, the sudden appearances, the things that vanish and the coins that turn up. In the Sanità district, on Via Fontanelle, a local family has reopened to the public a seventeenth-century basso, a street-level home, with five old wells, the Acquaquiglia del Pozzaro: as Il Mattino reported at the end of 2023, a pozzaro made of cloth welcomes visitors at the entrance, and inside, the story of the munaciello takes center stage.

Pranks, gifts and the rule of silence

So what does the munaciello do? Serao, in the second part of her chapter, draws up an inventory worthy of a comedy. He’s the one who leaves the pantry open, spills the oil and lets you find the ham bitten by the cat; he makes the broth boil over in the pot and the coffee in the cogoma (the coffeepot), he turns the marjoram yellow and gnaws the roots of the basil. And it’s always him when the Lotto draw turns up the number right next to the one you’d played.

But that same spirit, Serao writes, is “respected, feared and loved,” for his “strange mixture of good and evil.” Girls in love put themselves under his protection so their secret won’t be found out; spinsters call on him at midnight, out on the balcony, for nine days, so he’ll send the husband who is slow in coming; and the desperate Lotto player says the charm to him three times, hoping for numbers he can be sure of. Whoever has seen him – he appears mostly to girls and children – “keeps the precious secret to himself.”

In 1883 a Neapolitan folklorist, Luigi Correra, devoted an article to him in the folk-literature journal “Giambattista Basile.” His munaciello has many faces: usually a dwarf with silver buckles on his shoes and the red scazzettella, who goes around the house saying the Divine Office; sometimes an old man in a wig and pigtail who rings the doorbells in the dark. If you’re brave, you can try to snatch his skullcap: to get it back, Correra writes, the munaciello pays with a fistful of gold.

That’s the rule that has come down to us: you don’t talk about the munaciello’s gifts. Correra writes that for certain working-class women the munaciello swept the house and swaddled the baby, but pulled out the hair of any woman who told her friends about his favors. A Scottish tutor, Craufurd Tait Ramage, had already noted it; he spent three years in Naples, and in 1868 he gathered into a book his memories of a journey made in 1828. The little Monk, he writes, is won over with food, which people hope to see turned into gold; when someone gets rich all of a sudden, people say “Forse avrà il Monaciello in casa,” perhaps he has the Monaciello in the house; but woe to anyone who boasts of it, because the gifts vanish the way they came. The proverb sums it up: 'o munaciello, a chi arricchisce e a chi appezzentisce, to some he brings riches and others he sends into poverty.

As for his color, not even Serao agrees with herself. In the Leggende the red hood brings good luck and the black one bad luck; three years later, in Il ventre di Napoli (The Belly of Naples, 1884), the munaciello is “a little boy dressed in white when he brings good fortune, dressed in red when he brings misfortune.” Correra and Croce, meanwhile, put a red priest’s skullcap on his head. That’s how oral tradition works.

The foreigners’ monacello

The munaciello soon caught the curiosity of travelers too. As early as 1821 André Vieusseux was writing about him in English; he signed himself “a foreign officer in the British service” and published the letters he had written from Italy in 1818 and 1819. In Naples, he says, there’s a sprite people call il monacello: a short, stocky little man, in a monk’s long dark robes and a hat with an enormously wide brim. He’s harmless: he appears in the dead of night and beckons you to follow, and whoever has the courage to go after him is led to a hidden treasure. And these stories, Vieusseux notes, aren’t believed by the common people alone.

Seven years later the Irishman Thomas Keightley took up that description in his Fairy Mythology (1828), and added Basile’s bedcover-pulling monaciello. In the expanded 1850 edition he wonders where a spirit that seems to belong to Naples alone could come from: perhaps he’s the Kobold of the Normans, or the Spanish duende brought over by the Aragonese. The same Aragonese under whom, thirty years later, Serao would have her munaciello born.

In 1857 a Scottish fencing master, Archibald MacLaren, even devoted a ballad to him in The Fairy Family, a collection illustrated by an Oxford student named Edward Burne-Jones. Young Francisco is about to lose his house over a debt left by his late father; the night before it falls due he prays, and a tiny monk appears in the room, in a black cloak and hood, and beckons him to follow, all the way to the ruins of an abbey. At the last stroke of midnight he points to a spot on the floor: under the stone is a brass-bound chest.

The “inhabited” houses

Where does he live? Not in Chiaia or on Via Toledo, Serao answers, but in the alleys that run down from Toledo, around the Tribunali, the Sapienza, Foria, Vicaria, Mercato, Porto and Pendino; and the house where he has appeared is looked on “with distrust, but not without satisfaction.”

Correra adds Sant'Agostino alla Zecca, Forcella and the Mercanti, and explains how to recognize the house: late at night a strip of cloth drops from a window and then goes back up, you hear the sound of a tofa, the conch shell blown like a horn, or a whimper. Then there’s no doubt: “in quella casa ce steva 'u munaciello,” the munaciello was in that house.

Some houses, though, he took over completely. Ramage tells of a friend who had rented Villa Gallo, in Naples, for the summer, a house said to be frequented by the Monaciello: after sunset the servants moved about only in pairs, and some swore they had seen him. In Il ventre di Napoli, Serao mentions instead a handsome little palazzo on the Salita di Santa Teresa that was never rented: she had seen it shut up for twenty years, “because it is inhabited by spirits.”

And there’s no escaping a house with a munaciello. Correra tells of a poor lawyer whose case papers the munaciello made vanish on the very day of the hearing. In despair, the lawyer decided to “fare il quattro di maggio,” to do the Fourth of May – that is, to move house – and loaded his books, papers and furniture onto a cart. But on top of the load, guess who was sitting? The munaciello, shouting happily: “Cagnammo casa!” – we’re moving!

There’s even a story going around about a 1578 rent law, the Pragmatica de locto et conduco, that supposedly let a tenant tormented by the munaciello leave without paying. But those who report it, like the Castellammare website Libero Ricercatore, warn that they can’t vouch for it, and none of our sources shows the text. What is certain is Via Monaciello in Castellammare di Stabia, near the old district of Scanzano: the name, the same site says, came from the voice of the people, because there, at night, until the fifties, a munaciello used to kick passersby.

In Eduardo De Filippo’s Questi fantasmi! (These Ghosts!), which opened in January 1946, Pasquale Lojacono gets an apartment for free in an empty building because it’s said to be haunted, on condition that he shows himself to the neighbors so they’ll stop believing it. Then gifts and money start appearing in the house, and he convinces himself they come from the spirits. The doorman’s ghosts are another matter, but the mechanism is the munaciello’s: the audience knows there’s a flesh-and-blood man behind the gifts. Pasquale maybe knows it, maybe not.

From Serao to Sorrentino

The munaciello had gone on stage long before Eduardo. Correra cites the librettist Giovanni Battista Lorenzi, who in the preface to La finta maga per vendetta, set to music by Paisiello in 1768, told of a munaciello in love with a young lady of Posillipo, from whom he stole now her thimble, now her needle, now her pins: a charming comedy on that story had already been staged at the Teatro Nuovo.

Then came a song by Roberto Bracco, 'O Munaciello, from 1891, and a four-act comedy, Nu munaciello dint' 'a casa 'e Pulecenella (A Munaciello in Pulcinella’s House), which the collections attribute to Antonio Petito. In 1895 Ferdinando Russo, in the sonnets of his Cantastorie recited at the Circolo Filologico in Naples, even brings him into the epic of the paladins: Orlando and his companions climb up to a castle, go through its rooms and don’t find a living soul. Of course not: “Era d''o Munaciello!” – it belonged to the Munaciello!

In 1940 a young Anna Maria Ortese devoted a short story to him, published in “Ateneo Veneto” and later reissued by Adelphi: her Monaciello lives “in a small wardrobe with a broken lock and rickety doors, among piles of dark clothes and green parrot feathers.”

And in 2021 Paolo Sorrentino brought him to the movies in È stata la mano di Dio (The Hand of God): Il Mattino, reporting from the set of his scene, shot at the Villa del Cardinale Spinelli in Torre del Greco, introduced him as “the mischievous little friar of Neapolitan tradition told by Matilde Serao.”

The cousins outside Naples

Keightley thought the monaciello belonged to Naples alone, but he was wrong. Correra recalled that Neapolitans also called these spirits scazzamaurielli; and in 1884 his journal pointed to an article published in Molise about the mazzamauriello, “which is the same as the Neapolitan Munaciello.”

The most famous cousin lives in Basilicata, and Carlo Levi told his story in Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli, 1945). His monachicchi are “tiny, merry, airy creatures”: they tickle the soles of sleepers’ feet, pull off the sheets, hide things in the most unlikely places. On their heads they wear “a red hood bigger than they are”: whoever manages to snatch it can make them reveal where a treasure is hidden, but as soon as the monachicchio has his hood back he runs off jeering, and doesn’t keep his promise. Levi also tells of an engineer who, called in by the workers on a building site, shot at a monachicchio in a cave: the bullet bounced back and whistled past his head, while the little sprite jumped for joy.

The red hood, the cap to be snatched in exchange for a treasure: it’s an ancient family, which Correra traced all the way back to Petronius’s Satyricon, where a man snatches the cap from an Incubus and finds a treasure.

A big soul in a small body

At the end of her page Serao tries to say who he really is, and she doesn’t choose between chronicle and legend: the munaciello is “a soul that weeps and makes others weep; that smiles and makes others smile,” a child whom men have hurt and who now torments them “like a capricious child,” and then “caresses them, and consoles them.” Maybe that’s why nobody in Naples truly hates him: when something disappears you huff, when it turns up again you laugh, and when there’s a coin in your pocket that shouldn’t be there, you pretend nothing happened.

Let’s go back to that kitchen. The keys are back on the sideboard, the pot is boiling, Grandma hasn’t said another word. Someone, just in case, leaves a piece of bread on the table. You never know.

Where we come in

In the Smorfia, the munaciello is right at home among the monk, money and the house turned upside down. If you’d like to meet the other two figures who keep him company in the tradition, the Bella 'Mbriana and 'a Janara, you’ll find everything in the guide to the Munaciello, the Bella 'Mbriana and 'a Janara.