Why in Naples a hunchbacked man brings luck (and a hunchbacked woman doesn’t): the story of the Scartellato

On Via San Gregorio Armeno, the street of Nativity scenes, the horns are there all year round. Red, crooked, shiny, hanging in bunches like chili peppers put out to dry: some as small as a fingernail, some as big as an arm. And in the middle, on almost every stall, there he is. A little man in a black jacket and top hat, a red bow tie, a wide smile, his back bent under a round hump; and in place of legs, often, a red horn that ends in a point. He’s 'o Scartellato, the good-luck hunchback. People buy him to give as a gift, set him next to the shop register, and some, as they pass, brush his hump with the tip of a finger.

Behind that little terracotta man is a story four centuries long, made of real books, of kings who were afraid, of poets, and also of flesh-and-blood people who brought luck to others and not always to themselves. It’s worth telling in full, including its less kind side.

A basket on his back

Scartiello, in Neapolitan, is the hump; scartellato is the one who carries it. The De Mauro dictionary lists the word as a term from central and southern Italy and traces it to the medieval Latin cartellus, basket: the hump as a basket loaded on the back. Neapolitan pages on the tradition start instead from a Greek kartos, basket, and make the scartellato the “basket carrier.” The two roads end up in the same place, and that’s where the belief is born: if the hump is a basket, there must be something precious inside, and whoever touches it takes a little for himself.

There’s also a more mystical explanation, handed down for centuries: the man with the hump had been “touched by God,” and brushing against him meant brushing against something heaven had already touched. These explanations came later, as almost always happens with superstitions: first comes the gesture, then someone tries to find a reason for it.

Popa scartellata and the old woman in the woods

The word is old and has an excellent literary pedigree. In Giambattista Basile’s Cunto de li cunti, the great book of fairy tales in Neapolitan published between 1634 and 1636, Prince Tadeo has the women of the town gathered to tell stories to his wife, and chooses ten of them, “le meglio de la cetate,” the best in the city, the most skilled and the most talkative. Basile calls each one by her nickname, and they are merciless nicknames: Cecca storta (Crooked Cecca), Tolla nasuta (Big-Nosed Tolla), Antonella vavosa (Drooling Antonella)… and Popa scartellata. Popa the hunchback, then, is one of the ten voices who tell the book.

In the seventh tale of the second day, La palomma (The Dove), there’s an old woman who lives in a half-ruined little house, in a wood out toward the Astroni, “cossì àuta de scartiello, comme vascia de fortuna”: as high of hump as she was low of fortune. Here the hump brings nothing, quite the opposite: it’s the mark of poverty. The old woman begs for alms, sets a pot of beans on the windowsill, and the king’s son, passing by on a hunt, smashes it with stones on a dare from his servants. She hurls a curse at him, and the curse strikes home: the rest of the tale is the price the prince pays. Basile warns us from the very first line: l'ommo granne non deve dare male essempio a li chiù basce, the great should not set a bad example for the lowly. In this seventeenth-century scartellata, the moral sits entirely on the side of the hump.

His hump, and hers

In the fairy tale the hump belongs to a woman, and it’s no accident that it brings no luck. On this point tradition has always been clear-cut, and always unfair: the scartellato brings good luck, the scartellata brings seccia, bad luck. Giuseppe Pitrè, the father of Sicilian folklore studies, wrote that in Sicily a little hunchback “was always sought after and kept in service in private homes, in shops, on farms, as a likable bringer of good fortune,” while a hunchbacked woman was “misfortune in person.” In Naples the rule was the same.

The explanations people give are children of their time: the man touched by God, the woman touched by the devil; or the bent woman who looks too much like the witch in fairy tales. They don’t hold up, and there’s no need to defend them: all they tell us is how a society looked at bodies, especially women’s bodies. There is one exception, people in Naples point out: the Befana, the Epiphany witch, bent over too, but bearing gifts.

From Bari to Monte Carlo

Naples isn’t alone. In Bari, the Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno reports, as late as the first half of the twentieth century anyone who ran into a cemmerùte, a hunchbacked woman, turned gloomy and hurried off to find a ciùmme, a hunchbacked man, to brush his hump and cancel out the bad omen. The hunchback, for his part, tried to dodge these “hump touchers”; and they fell back on blowing him little kisses from a distance off the ends of their fingers, quickly, so as not to be laughed at. And if he showed any annoyance, he got a few nasty words for his trouble. It’s the same story seen from the other side: that of a man who had to defend himself on the street from the hands of strangers.

On the Gargano, in Mattinata, the hunchback has even ended up on the Christmas table. The scartelléte, fried and crinkled pastry ribbons, with honey or vincotto (cooked grape must), take their name from the scartellato himself, according to the town’s newspaper, because the pastry “is full of humps rolled up one on top of another.”

And farther still. In 1895 the Englishman Frederick Thomas Elworthy, in a hefty book on the evil eye, The Evil Eye, noted that in Italy, and in southern Europe generally, the hunchback is a good omen, and that at Monte Carlo casino-goers believed their luck was assured if they managed to touch one on their way to play. Among the amulets in his collection, all sold openly contra la jettatura, were little hunchbacks; to him they were the survival of a very ancient cult, relatives of the statuettes of the Egyptian god Bes, and he recalled that in Constantinople silver ones were sold. His conclusion: the casino-goers of Monte Carlo did not invent their lucky Hunchback.

Against the jettatura

If the scartellato brings good luck, who is he up against? The one who brings bad luck: the jettatore, whose “natural antagonist” he has been called. Jettatura — from iettare, to throw: the evil eye cast with a look — even has a birth date on paper: in 1787 the Neapolitan jurist Nicola Valletta published the Cicalata sul fascino volgarmente detto jettatura (A Chatter on the Spell Commonly Called Jettatura), an essay so half-serious that to this day nobody can tell whether he believed in it or not. The jettatore, in tradition, isn’t wicked: he’s a kind of innocent sorcerer, who brings bad luck without meaning to.

The Cicalata, when you actually read it, is a booklet of about sixty pages, and Valletta covers himself right from the preface: he wrote it to amuse “a learned company” that met at the home of the Marquis of Villarosa, for the pleasure of “giving body to a shadow,” and he admits to having “found reason where there is no reason.” Then he calls his readers “my most beloved brothers in jettatura,” proves that anyone we dislike is “without a shadow of a doubt” a jettatore, and tells of a misadventure of his own: after twenty years as a professor he had to bring a petition to the king at Caserta, and a friend, “whom I later knew to be a terrible jettatore,” said only this to him: “it’s difficult.” There followed pouring rain, a tipsy coachman, a horse in pain, and in front of the king the petition could no longer be found in his pocket. The worst of it, he adds, is that his friend brings it up every day, laughing.

And people believed in it in high places. In La fine di un Regno (The End of a Kingdom, 1909), Raffaele De Cesare tells how Ferdinand II, having to invite to a court ball the Duke of Ventignano, a respected man but with a terrible reputation, said: “I don’t believe in it; invite him, but I warn you the party won’t take place.” The ball, set for January 1857, really didn’t take place; and the poor duke, “a man of wit,” bore in peace, De Cesare writes, “that sort of odious legend” that had grown up around his name.

The canon, the king and the foreigners

It even happened to the canon Andrea de Jorio, who in 1832 had published La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano (Gesture in Naples and Gesture in Classical Antiquity), which explains, among other things, the ways of making the horns: popular rumor ranked him among the most feared jettatori in the city. Alexandre Dumas, in Le Corricolo, tells of a “chanoine Ojori” – Benedetto Croce recognized De Jorio in him – who for fifteen years had pestered Ferdinand I to let him present a book of his. The king always refused; on January 2, 1825, begged by everyone, he gave in, and the next day received him for two hours. The following morning he was found dead. The doctors said apoplexy; the people, Dumas writes, didn’t believe a word of it.

In the same book Dumas devotes a whole chapter to the jettatura, a little guide for foreigners. In Neapolitan homes with any claim to aristocracy, he writes, the first thing you see in the entrance hall is a pair of horns, preferably brought in from Sicily: he has seen some three feet long, at five hundred francs a pair. To wear on your person there are little horns of coral or jet, sold on every street corner. If you see two men talking and one is holding his hand bent behind his back, take a good look at the other: he’s a jettatore, “or at least a man who has the misfortune of passing for one.” The foreigner, he assures us, first laughs at the jettatura, then starts to think about it, and after three months goes around covered in horns from head to toe. Why horns, of all things? Dumas tried to figure it out, and gives up: it’s that way because it’s that way, and don’t ask him anything more, or he’d have to say the words that cost the human mouth the most: I don’t know.

Théophile Gautier, in 1857, wrote a short novel about it, Jettatura: a young Frenchman arrives in Naples and everyone, from the porter to the coachman, takes him for a jettatore. Count Altavilla wears, hanging from his watch chain, forked sprigs of coral, little hands of Vesuvius lava, white and black horns; the hotel maid, Gelsomina, hands him the lamp while holding behind her skirt a hand already bent into horns, with a correctness, Gautier writes, that “the reverend Andrea de Jorio” would have approved. The story ends badly, as Romantic tales did back then. But at one point the count says something that still holds true: jettatori should be avoided, not mistreated.

The hunchback in flesh and blood

Before he became a figurine, the scartellato was a person. In de Jorio’s book there’s a plate titled Il primo ingresso della sposa nella casa del marito (The Bride’s First Entrance into Her Husband’s House): a friend of the family wishes the bride that the evil eye may never touch her, the mother-in-law makes the fig gesture at her for good luck, and behind the procession “follows a little hunchback,” one of those who, the canon writes in words from 1832 that nobody would use today, “making a profit even from their unfortunate build, take to playing the jester, and to living by cheering up company.” He knows every wedding comes with a banquet, and he makes his way in, leaping and laughing.

For some, in other words, the hump was also a trade: bringing luck to parties, letting themselves be touched, making people laugh, and in exchange a seat at the table. A “walking amulet,” as Neapolitan pages still call him. Marcello Marchesi put it in a one-liner that weighs more than a treatise: “They tell hunchbacks they bring good luck. To console them.”

The Nativity scene, thankfully, has looked at him with different eyes. In 2017 the San Martino museum put back on display a dozen Nativity figures from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from the collection of a Salerno family, the Carraras, which had been kept out of the galleries since 1980: peasants, working people, and among them “the hunchback and the little dwarf woman.” No top hat, no horn: common folk, like all the other figures. “Their beauty,” the curator told Il Mattino, “lies precisely in this diversity.”

The other side of the coin was told by Luigi Pirandello, and a Neapolitan brought it to the screen. In La patente (The License), a 1911 short story later turned into a play, Rosario Chiàrchiaro has lost his job because everyone believes he’s a jettatore, and people make charms against him as he goes by. So he doesn’t ask for justice: he asks the judge for a jettatore’s license, so he can make people pay to keep him away, and he shows up dressed for the part, with a “scruffy, bristly beard,” a pair of “big bone-rimmed glasses” and a rattan cane in his hand. In 1954, in the movie Questa è la vita, Luigi Zampa gave the part to Totò. The hunchback and the jettatore are two sides of the same coin: people onto whom a city unloaded its luck and its fear, and who sometimes had no other road than to make a trade of it.

From flesh to terracotta

Today the good-luck hunchback is almost only an object, and that’s for the best. He has a precise iconography: black top hat and jacket, white shirt, red bow tie; on the big board of the tombola, Naples’ Christmas family game, he’s drawn with a top hat, a vest and legs shaped like a red horn.

And on tombola night the scartellato sits down at the table with everyone. Tradition has it that the game was born in Naples in 1734, from a quarrel between King Charles of Bourbon, who wanted to make the Lotto official, and the Dominican friar Gregorio Maria Rocco, who found it immoral: the king won, on condition that the Lotto stopped over the Christmas holidays, and the Neapolitans, so as not to go without, brought it into their homes. The ninety numbers sit in a wicker basket, the panariello, and whoever draws them doesn’t read them out: he calls them by the images of the Smorfia. So when the hunchback comes out, nobody says the number: they say 'o scartellato. His name comes from a basket, and that night, out of a basket he comes.

In the shops, the little hunchback sits beside the curniciello, the little horn, which to work, the rule says, has to be red, handmade and above all given as a gift — buying one for yourself doesn’t count — and tuosto, stuorto e cu 'a ponta: hard, crooked and pointed. And he stands near the Sciò Sciò, the evil-eye-chasing figurine of the San Gregorio Armeno shops that Il Mattino describes as “clumsy and comical”: dressed in black, covered in crooked red horns and garlic, with a top hat on its head. The charm, in the version the paper says may be the oldest, goes like this: aglio, fravaglio, fattura ca nun quaglia; corna e bicorne, cape 'e alice e cape d'aglio (roughly: garlic and small fry, may the spell not take; horns and double horns, anchovy heads and garlic heads).

Pulcinella, too, if you look closely, once had a hump. In 1621, in the etchings of the Balli di Sfessania, the Frenchman Jacques Callot drew his Polliciniello with a belly that turns into a hump, often a double one like that of the French Polichinelle; in Pier Leone Ghezzi’s eighteenth-century drawings the hump disappears. The Neapolitan mask lost it along the way and kept the nose: the nose of the bronze Pulcinella that the sculptor Lello Esposito gave to the city in 2012, in Vico del Fico al Purgatorio, a stone’s throw from Via dei Tribunali, which passersby rub for good luck. It’s the same old gesture, moved from a man’s back to a statue’s nose.

Real fortune

“What is certain is that the hunchback doesn’t consider himself lucky,” one of the Neapolitan pages devoted to the scartellato says frankly. The loveliest comment, though, was written by a poet: Raffaele Chiurazzi (1875–1957), born in a basso, a street-level home, in the Cavone, near Piazza Dante. In his poem 'O scartellato there’s a little hunchbacked boy sitting in the street, “muorto 'e friddo e famma,” dying of cold and hunger, begging for a coin to take home to his mother. The poet gives him one and asks him why his mother leaves him out in the street; and the boy, quick as a flash: “Io so' ll'uocchio deritto 'e mamma mia!”, I’m my mother’s right eye – the apple of her eye – and at night she kisses me even in her sleep. The poet walks off toward the Mercatiello thinking it over, and in the end the scartellato seems to him the most beautiful and the luckiest of boys, compared with himself, who lost his mother the very day he was born.

That’s the truest reading of this whole story. Fortune wasn’t in the hump, and you couldn’t take it with the tip of a finger: it lay, if anywhere, in being loved. The rest — the baskets, the top hats, the coral horns — is theater, and in Naples theater is respected. People, even more so.

Where we come in

In the Smorfia the scartellato has a place of his own, and he turns up in dreams like every other symbol: if you’d like to see which family of numbers he belongs to, and in what company, you’ll find it all in the guide to the ninety numbers, family by family.