La Smorfia is traditionally linked to the city of Naples . The Neapolitans, more than others in Italy and perhaps in the world, have a passion for gambling and luck and with the Smorfia they attribute a number to everything: circumstances, events, people, etc … and this happens both in reality and in dreams.
The 90 numbers of the Neapolitan grimace
The table you see represents all 90 numbers of the Neapolitan grimace , and no doubt some are more familiar to you than others.
In the Neapolitan grimace the meaning of dreams is expressed with numbers, and these represent everything that happens during a player’s sleep. In fact, in addition to being Neapolitan, this sequence of numbers is also called the grimace of dreams.
However, you will certainly have recognized some known combinations, whose popularity has gone beyond the Neapolitan borders.
For example, in the Neapolitan grimace 71 it has a meaning known to all, and identifies the ommo ‘and shit therefore it will be played when we dream of someone who has not behaved very well with us.
However, there is something for all tastes, from 17 which represents the misfortune and has become the bad number par excellence, to the classic fear is 90.
This cabal of numbers now has a history of over a hundred years, and is so connected to the city of Naples that it is sometimes called the Neapolitan cabala in a variant of the name.
The grimace and Naples
In fact, in Naples it is a consolidated custom to combine dreams made at night with corresponding numbers in order to match the grimace mainly to the lotto , but also to bingo and bingo .
And this habit, now rooted and consolidated in the Neapolitan culture, has spread over the years inside the boot. Who has never happened, then, to match the Bingo numbers, names or situations of the grimace?
” The Neapolitan people redo their great dream of happiness every week, they live for six days in a growing, intrusive hope ” […] – according to the description of the passion of the Lotto game for the Neapolitans provided by the early twentieth century author Matilde Serao in his famous work “ The belly of Naples ” – “ the lot is the large dream […] it is the great happy vision that satisfies the oppressed people; it is the vast hallucination that takes souls “.
If on the one hand the game of Lotto has distant origins (perhaps not everyone knows that in the past it also had a different name, “Lotte delle Zitelle“), the Smorfia has even more distant origins.
References to the concept of Smorfia are already found in Greek civilization : the philosopher Artemidoro da Daldi in fact began to find a correlation between dreams and messages from the afterlife.
But where does this singular name, Grimace, come from? And what origins does the Neapolitan Smorfia have?
Where does the term Neapolitan Smorfia come from?
The word Grimace derives from the name ” Morpheus” , God of dreams in the classical tradition: the interpretation of dreams is closely linked to the concept of Grimace.
According to some theories, the Neapolitan Grimace is directly related to the Jewish Kabbalah . In fact, as the Qabbalah associates a meaning to every word, letter or sign, so the Neapolitan Smorfia interprets every fact, situation, dream or person by assigning a number from 1 to 90 (those of the Lotto).
La Smorfia has been extensively treated by various Neapolitan personalities from the world of theater, cinema, literature: just think of Eduardo De Filippo or Massimo Troisi, Enzo Decaro, Lello Arena, and many others.
In practice, the Neapolitan grimace and dream interpretation combination has given rise to a vast literature of books, films and comedies, which have decreed its popularity even on a national scale.
