L'aneme d'o priatorio

L'aneme d'o priatorio: the souls in purgatory. Eighty-five touches one of the deepest devotions in Naples — the forgotten souls, the ones nobody prays for anymore, who get adopted and cared for. In the Fontanelle cemetery it went on for generations: people chose a skull, gave it a name, asked it for protection. It isn’t folklore: it’s a pact between the living and the dead. In dreams, eighty-five arrives when someone who is gone comes back, or when there’s something to make amends for. It’s the number of atonement, but without harshness: in tradition the souls in purgatory aren’t punished forever — they’re waiting, and something can be done for them. That’s also why it’s a number of memory more than of guilt. The images that lead here are all about passing through. Purgatory, and the swallow, which leaves and comes back: the Smorfia worked out on its own that souls, in the popular imagination, are neither here nor there — suspended between two places, waiting to find peace. If eighty-five came up in your dream, there was a memory in it asking for attention. We say nothing about the afterlife — that isn’t our job. We say that in Naples the dead are kept close, and that in your dream someone made sure to be remembered.