Saint / folklore
pazzariello
Background
A traditional Neapolitan costumed figure, part street-advertiser, part exorcist; ‘one is born a pazzariello, not made one’.
The pazzariello (“little madman”) was a street herald of old Naples. He wore a parody of an eighteenth-century military uniform, with a cocked hat, braid and a long baton. Behind him came a small band: bass drum, cymbals, a piccolo. Shopkeepers hired him to announce an opening, a new barrel of wine or a sale. He would caper through the quarter reciting improvised patter in dialect, drawing a crowd before leading it to the shop door.
The best-known pazzariello on film is Totò’s, in Vittorio De Sica’s L’oro di Napoli (1954). By then the figure was already becoming a piece of folklore rather than a working trade. Today he appears mainly at festivals and re-enactments. Lewis’s reading of him as an exorcist reflects the Neapolitan habit of giving anything new, a shop included, a ritual clearing of bad luck.
In Naples ’44
Cocked hat, stick, drummers and piper, hired to caper into a newly reopening shop — explained as advertising for the illiterate, but ‘his real function is that of an exorcist’, driving out evil spirits and the evil eye. Lewis sees his first on the Via San Pasquale.
Appears in 1 diary entry.
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February 28 1944The arrival of spring in Naples is marked by seasonal foods, street cries, and a burst of communal spring-cleaning and song.
hereditary exorcist/joker figure warding off evil spirits and the evil eye
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