Brian Scott reads Alexandre Dumas's 1843 account of Naples's belief in the getatura, the evil eye. One unnamed man with a hooked nose and fixed stare was blamed for everything from a wet nurse losing her milk to the burning of Teatro San Carlo to the deaths of Pope Pius VIII and King Ferdinand I. Dumas refused to name him, fearing his gaze would reach even readers.
Chapters
In 1843, Alexandre Dumas published a travel book about southern Italy called Le Coricolo and gave 3 entire chapters of it to one subject: the Neapolitan belief in the getatura. The word comes from getare, to throw or to cast. A geritor or geritura is a person who casts something with his eyes. Neapolitans held that such a person could carry the power his entire life, harm everyone around him, and remain completely innocent of doing it. And Dumas devoted most of 3 chapters to one man. He described him precisely in Dumas's own words: thin lips, large fixed eyes, a hooked nose like a raven's beak. Then Dumas told the man's life, and the life reads as a single continuous catalogue. His mother died giving birth to him in 1776. The wet nurse engaged to feed him lost her milk the moment she took the infant in her arms. His father, an ambassador for the Bourbon court, was disgraced and stripped of his post. On his first day at seminary, everybody in his class came down with a convulsive cough. The new arrival stayed perfectly well. He entered an academic competition and took second prize. The boy who took first broke his leg on the stage walking up to collect it. He went to the opera at the Teatro San Carlo. The theater burned. Naples went on to attribute to that man's gaze the impotence of his own son-in-law, the death of Pope Pius VIII, and the fall of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Everyone in the city knew Xander Dumas, who fought duels, who published attacks on kings, who feared very little in this world, wrote three chapters about the man who withheld his name from every page of them. The reason he gave was that setting the name down in ink might draw the eye toward whoever read it. Naples also held him to be among the most dangerous giuditori in the city. Egiorgio wanted an audience with King Ferdinand I to present a book he had written. Eventually. The petitions wore him down, and he agreed. Ferdinand I died within days. Court physicians recorded apoplexy. Stendhal dates the audience to July of 1824, and Dumas dates it the 2nd of January, 1825, and the king died on the 4th of January, 1825. Pope Pius IX held the longest reign in the history of the papacy— 31 years. His council was the First Vatican, and his doctrine was papal infallibility. Rome believed he had the evil eye. Frederick Thomas Ellsworthy quoted him at length in 1895 in the standard English study of the subject.
