Best books on Southern Italian and Neapolitan folk magic
From Scholarship and Primary Sources to Literary Context
When I started putting this list together, the first problem I ran into wasn’t finding books. It was that most of the serious scholarship exists in Italian and hasn’t been translated. What’s available in English is genuinely good. There just isn’t enough of it. Southern Italian folk magic, the kind rooted in Naples, Campania, Basilicata, and Puglia, is its own tradition: the jettatura, the fattura, the cult of the souls in purgatory, the ritual logic of the tarantella, and a relationship between folk practice and Catholicism that never got cleanly separated.
This is what I’ve found worth reading: ethnography, folklore studies, primary sources, memoir, cultural history, and literary fiction that render the tradition from the inside.
Start with de Martino. If you want the literary atmosphere of Naples rather than the scholarship, go to Ortese and Ferrante. For the older folk imagination beneath the tradition, read Basile.
Some links on this page are affiliate links. If you choose to buy, it supports the site at no extra cost to you.
Best books on Southern Italian folk magic for beginners
If you don’t want to read the entire list right away, here are the strongest entry points.
- Best book on the evil eye tradition: The Evil Eye by Frederick Thomas Elworthy
- Best scholarly foundation: Magic: A Theory from the South by Ernesto de Martino
- Best book on tarantism: The Land of Remorse by Ernesto de Martino
- Best primary source: The Tale of Tales by Giambattista Basile
- Best literary portrait of Naples: Neapolitan Chronicles by Anna Maria Ortese
- Best beginner-friendly living tradition guide: Italian Folk Magic by Mary-Grace Fahrun
A note before the list
English-language scholarship on specifically Neapolitan folk magic is sparse.
The tradition itself isn’t sparse. The jettatura, the evil eye as understood through the Neapolitan figure of the jettatore, is among the most well-documented folk belief systems in southern Europe. The fattura, the binding curse, is distinct enough from northern Italian practice to constitute its own study. The street-level popular religion of Naples, with its shrines to souls in purgatory and its integration of folk magic into Catholic devotion, has been observed and written about since the eighteenth century. The tarantella, the ritual exorcism dance of Puglia and Campania, continues to draw scholars, musicians, and ethnographers alike.
But most of the sustained scholarship on this material remains in Italian. What exists in English is excellent, and the books below are genuine starting points. They’re not sufficient for the depth of the tradition itself.
These books address that gap as well as English-language publishing currently allows.
Ernesto de Martino and the foundations of Southern Italian ethnography
Ernesto de Martino (1908–1965) was a Neapolitan philosopher and anthropologist whose fieldwork in Basilicata and Puglia produced the most important studies of southern Italian folk belief available in English. No serious engagement with Southern Italian folk magic is possible without him.
Magic: A Theory from the South by Ernesto de Martino, trans. Dorothy Louise Zinn
Originally published in Italian as Sud e magia in 1959 and translated into English by HAU Books in 2015.
De Martino conducted fieldwork in Basilicata, documenting ceremonial magic as it was practiced in the southern peasant world: the fattura, the evil eye, protection rituals, folk healing, Catholic devotional practice, and what he called the “crisis of presence,” moments when individuals lose their footing in historical reality and ritual becomes a means of reintegration.
What I keep coming back to in this book is its refusal to treat magic as irrationality. De Martino approaches folk belief as a response to specific historical conditions — poverty, instability, and the particular kind of precarity that comes from living at the margins of a modernizing state — and that framing holds up.
The framework still holds because it refuses condescension.
Book details:
- Publisher: HAU Books
- English edition: 2015
- Genre: Anthropology/folklore studies
Find a copy → Bookshop.org | Amazon
The Land of Remorse by Ernesto de Martino, trans. Dorothy Louise Zinn
First published in Italian in 1961 and translated into English in 2005.
This is de Martino’s monumental study of tarantism, the belief that the bite of the mythical tarantula produces a form of possession that can only be relieved through ritual music and dance.
De Martino spent summers in the Salentine peninsula of Puglia with a research team built to document what he was actually seeing: ritual dancers, exorcism ceremonies, possession states, and the music that accompanied all of it. He brought a psychiatrist and an ethnomusicologist specifically because the phenomenon didn’t fit inside any single discipline. Nothing written since has superseded it.
What makes the book remarkable is its complexity. De Martino refuses simplistic explanations. Tarantism is neither dismissed as a mental illness nor romanticized as a pagan survival. Instead, he shows how ritual functions as a social and psychological structure within a culture shaped by economic hardship and historical isolation.
The photographs in the book — women mid-dance, exhausted, ecstatic, collapsed on chapel floors — document something that written description can’t fully convey.
I’d read it alongside Magic: A Theory from the South. Together they give you the clearest picture of southern Italian folk belief available in English.
Book details:
Genre: Ethnography/folklore studies
Publisher: Free Association Books
English edition: 2005
Find a copy → Amazon
Primary Sources
The Tale of Tales by Giambattista Basile
Written in Neapolitan dialect and published posthumously between 1634 and 1636, The Tale of Tales is the first national collection of fairy tales in Europe.
Basile was working sixty years before Perrault and almost two centuries before the Brothers Grimm. His versions of what became Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Rapunzel are recognizable but wrong in the best way: bawdy, violent, and funnier than you’d expect from something that old. The prose is extravagant even in translation.
For readers interested in Southern Italian folk magic, the importance of the collection lies in the worldview beneath the stories: curses, enchantments, wise women, supernatural bargains, and the porous boundary between ordinary life and magical intervention.
Basile isn’t inventing these ideas. He’s recording a living folk imagination, and, by reading him, you start to understand what ordinary belief was like in seventeenth-century Naples.
Nancy Canepa’s Penguin Classics translation is the version to read.
Book details:
- Publisher: Penguin Classics
- English edition: 2016
- Genre: Folklore/fairy tales
Find a copy → Bookshop.org | Amazon
Italian Witchcraft Charms and Neapolitan Witchcraft: The Cimaruta, Its Structure and Development
This compact folklore volume reprints early twentieth-century material on Neapolitan witchcraft, with particular attention to the cimaruta amulet and the beliefs surrounding it.
The most valuable section is an oral transcript of an interview between the author and a practicing southern Italian witch. This primary source type remains genuinely rare in English-language material on the tradition.
This is not a comprehensive overview. It works best as a companion to Frederick Thomas Elworthy’s The Evil Eye and to broader books on Italian folk magic. What it offers instead is specificity: detailed material on one object and the belief system attached to it.
Find a copy → Bookshop.org | Amazon
The Evil Eye by Frederick Thomas Elworthy
Originally published in 1895, this remains one of the most important Victorian studies of the evil eye tradition, especially in Naples.
Elworthy documents the jettatura, the Neapolitan concept of the involuntary evil-eye carrier, alongside protective gestures such as the mano cornuta and mano in fica, horn amulets, charms, and ritual protections.
The anthropological framework is Victorian and shows its age, but the documentation itself — gestures, amulets, ritual objects, folk explanations — is irreplaceable. Elworthy was working from direct observation in Naples, not secondhand sources, and that shows.
For readers specifically interested in the malocchio tradition, this is foundational reading.
Find a copy → Bookshop.org | Amazon
Cultural history
Black Madonnas: Feminism, Religion, and Politics in Italy by Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum
Birnbaum’s cultural history traces the Black Madonna tradition across southern Italy: Campania, Basilicata, Sicily, and Puglia, where Marian devotion and folk practice never got separated the way official Church history would suggest.
What makes the book useful is its insistence that folk Catholicism and folk magic cannot be cleanly separated in Southern Italy. Saints, ex-votos, shrines, ancestor reverence, healing rituals, and protective devotion operate inside the same symbolic system.
Birnbaum approaches this through feminism, religious history, and cultural memory, which means she’s asking different questions than most writers on Italian folk practice — not what the rituals are, but whose they were and what they meant to the women who maintained them.
Find a copy → Bookshop.org | Amazon
Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi
Published in 1945, Levi’s memoir documents his political exile to the village of Aliano in the Basilicata during the Fascist period.
What emerges from the book is a portrait of southern Italy shaped by poverty, isolation, folk medicine, superstition, ancestral fear, and intimate relationships with the dead.
The folk magic Levi describes, protective charms, curse remedies, healers, and the evil eye, function as part of the village’s social infrastructure. Nobody explains it to him as a tradition or a belief system. It’s just what people do.
I’d read this alongside de Martino. They’re documenting the same world: Levi from the inside, as someone who lived there; de Martino, as a scholar studying it systematically. The gap between those two perspectives is itself instructive.
Book details:
Genre: Memoir / cultural history
Publisher: FSG Classics
Original publication: 1945
Find a copy → Bookshop.org | Amazon
Living practice and modern Italian folk magic
Italian Folk Magic by Mary-Grace Fahrun
Fahrun’s practice-oriented guide draws heavily from Southern Italian and Sicilian family traditions, especially beliefs surrounding the malocchio, domestic ritual, kitchen witchery, and Catholic-folk devotional practice.
It’s grounded in her own family practice rather than reconstructed from scholarship, and that difference is audible throughout.
If you’re looking for a modern introduction to the living practice rather than the historical record, this is where I’d send you first.
Find a copy → Bookshop.org | Amazon
Italian Witchcraft by Raven Grimassi
Grimassi’s work is often associated with Stregheria and Tuscan folk traditions, but Southern Italian influence runs through the book as well, partly through his Campanian family background.
It’s not a scholarly source and shouldn’t be treated as one, but it’s been influential in English-language discussions of Italian folk magic, and you’ll encounter it if you read widely in the field. Worth knowing it exists and what it claims.
Find a copy → Bookshop.org | Amazon
Literary and folkloric context
Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino
Calvino’s regional collection includes substantial material from Campania, Basilicata, Sicily, and Puglia.
The southern stories feel different from the northern ones. They’re more urgent, less courtly. The supernatural in them isn’t a narrative device; it’s a condition of the world. Saints, devils, and wise women operate on the same register as poverty and hunger.
For readers trying to understand the imaginative logic beneath Southern Italian folk belief, this collection matters enormously.
Find a copy → Bookshop.org | Amazon
Gesture in Naples and Gesture in Classical Antiquity by Andrea de Jorio
Originally published in 1832, this strange and fascinating work documents the gesture language of Naples, including the protective hand signs associated with the evil eye tradition.
De Jorio argues for continuity between modern Neapolitan gestures and classical antiquity, creating a hybrid text that feels part anthropology, part archaeology, and part cultural history.
Adam Kendon’s English translation includes a substantial scholarly introduction that helps situate the work historically.
This isn’t casual reading. But if you want to understand the gesture language attached to the evil eye tradition, the mano cornuta, the mano in fica, the specific movements that recur in folk practice, there’s nothing else in English that does this.
Find a copy → Bookshop.org | Amazon
Literary context
Neapolitan Chronicles by Anna Maria Ortese
Originally published in 1953 as Il mare non bagna Napoli.
Ortese’s portrait of postwar Naples is unsparing, feverish, and absolutely precise about the city’s relationship with poverty, fatalism, superstition, and the way survival warps ordinary life.
Reading Ortese after de Martino is clarifying. She’s writing about the same city he was studying, and the folk belief is embedded in her prose the same way it was embedded in the neighborhoods, not foregrounded, just present.
For readers who want to understand what Neapolitan folk belief feels like from the inside, this may be the most important literary work on the list.
Ferrante has cited Ortese as a direct influence, which becomes visible once you’ve read both: the same unforgiving attention to the neighborhood, the same refusal to make Naples picturesque.
Book details:
- Publisher: New Vessel Press
- English translation: 2018
- Genre: Literary nonfiction/reportage
Find a copy → Bookshop.org | Amazon
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Folk belief runs quietly beneath Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. The evil eye, curses, protective gestures, and inherited fear appear not as overt magical systems but as part of the neighborhood’s emotional structure.
What Ferrante captures especially well is the psychological atmosphere of Naples: the sense that unseen forces, social and supernatural alike, shape daily life.
The supernatural in Ferrante’s Naples rarely announces itself directly. It lingers instead in gesture, reputation, inherited fear, neighborhood logic, and the persistent sense that certain people carry danger with them.
Read the entire quartet rather than stopping with the first volume. The folk elements become clearer as the series progresses.
Book details:
- Publisher: Europa Editions
- English translation: 2012
- Genre: Literary fiction
How to read across this list
If I were handing this list to someone starting from zero, I’d tell them to begin with de Martino.
Magic: A Theory from the South establishes the intellectual framework: folk magic as a cultural response to instability, poverty, historical marginalization, and psychic crisis. The Land of Remorse extends that framework into tarantism and ritual possession.
Then Levi. Christ Stopped at Eboli covers the same territory that de Martino studied, but from the inside. Levi lived in Basilicata; he didn’t visit it with a research team.
Basile, I’d read early. The older folk imagination he’s recording (curses, enchantments, supernatural bargains) is the substratum that everything else in this list sits on top of.
Elworthy and de Jorio belong together. One documents the evil eye tradition directly; the other records the gestures and symbolic language surrounding it.
I wouldn’t save Ortese and Ferrante for the end. They do something the scholarship can’t. They put you inside the atmosphere of Naples rather than describing it from the outside.
Frequently asked questions
The jettatura is the Neapolitan belief in the involuntary evil eye carrier, a person believed to cause harm unintentionally through their gaze or presence. Unlike a deliberate curse, the jettatura operates without conscious intent.
Frederick Thomas Elworthy’s The Evil Eye remains one of the best English-language studies of the tradition.
The fattura is a deliberate curse or magical working directed against a specific individual. Unlike the malocchio, which may occur accidentally, the fattura requires intention and ritual action.
Southern Italian traditions surrounding the fattura often involve physical objects associated with the target, including photographs, hair, nail clippings, candles, saint images, or other devotional materials.
Mary-Grace Fahrun’s Italian Folk Magic discusses these traditions from within Southern Italian family practice.
Tarantism is the Southern Italian belief that the bite of the mythical tarantula produces a state of possession or psychic disturbance that can only be relieved through ritual music and dance.
The tradition became especially associated with Puglia and the tarantella.
Ernesto de Martino’s The Land of Remorse remains the definitive study.
Southern Italian traditions place greater emphasis on the evil eye, folk Catholicism, saint devotion, ancestor reverence, ritual healing, and the integration of magic into ordinary domestic life.
The Greek, Arab, Spanish, and Mediterranean cultural layers of the south also produce a different symbolic atmosphere from northern Italian folk traditions.
The Neapolitan concept of the jettatura, for example, does not appear in the same form in northern Italy.
Much of the foundational scholarship remains untranslated. Ernesto de Martino, Giuseppe Pitrè, Roberto De Simone, and other major figures wrote primarily in Italian, often incorporating dialectal material that further complicates translation.
Interest in Southern Italian folklore has grown in recent years, partly through the international success of Elena Ferrante’s novels, but the English-language gap remains significant.
Where to go next
If you want to go further into regional folk belief, start with the Best books on Italian witchcraft, which cover Stregheria, the malocchio, and Italian folk Catholicism across multiple regions.
Readers interested in the darker literary side of these traditions should continue with Folk Gothic and Best Gothic horror novels that still feel disturbing, especially novels rooted in superstition, ritual, inherited fear, and haunted family structures.
