In July I was in a showroom south of Rome, at the end of a long table of samples, and I picked up a small gold horn on a chain because I liked the weight of it. The woman selling it took it out of my hand. Not rudely. She held it, looked at me, and asked who it was for.
I said it was for the shop. She relaxed and put it back in my palm. Later, over coffee, she told me that if I had said it was for me she would have made me put it down. She was not joking, and she was not selling. She was following a rule, and she assumed I already knew it.
The thing is older than Rome
The Italians call it a cornicello, the little horn, or a corno portafortuna, the horn that carries luck. Most people place it in Naples, and Naples has certainly made it its own, but the shape runs back further than that, through Etruscan and Greek hands, to a time well before there was a Rome to be Neapolitan about.
What it does, in the tradition, is turn away the malocchio — the evil eye, the harm that arrives through somebody else's envy. That is a specific idea, and I think it is why the object has lasted. It is not a charm against bad weather or bad luck in the abstract. It is a charm against being resented.
By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the goldsmiths of Naples were making them in coral, in silver, in gold. The coral ones were the most prized, because red was itself considered protective long before anyone thought to shape it into a horn. Those three materials are still the ones the traditional makers use, which tells you how little the object has needed to change.
Three rules, none of them written down
Nobody hands you a card with these. I collected them the way you collect anything in Italy, by getting one of them wrong in front of someone.
One: it has to twist. A straight horn is a decoration. The Neapolitan form is always curved, always tapered, turning as it goes down — and the turn is the point. The twist was believed to catch what was coming at you and send it somewhere else. A horn that goes straight down has nothing to catch with.
Two: it has to be gold, silver, or red coral. Not because those are the expensive ones. Coral was the original, gold arrived later as a way of keeping the shape without the fragility, and silver sat between them. What is not on the list is everything else.
Three: somebody else has to hand it to you. This is the one that stopped me at the table. Tradition holds that the horn works when it is given, and that the giver's intention is part of what makes it work. Buy your own and you have bought a very pretty pendant, which is a different object entirely.
What the third rule is actually for
I have thought about that showroom a lot since, because the third rule looked to me like superstition and turned out to be something else.
Think about what the horn is for. It protects you from other people's envy. So it cannot be a thing you go out and acquire for yourself — the whole meaning of it is that somebody looked at you, wanted good things for you rather than your things, and paid for the proof. The gift is not the packaging around the charm. The gift is the charm. An Italian woman wearing one is not telling you she believes in the evil eye. She is telling you somebody in her life took the trouble.
Modern Italy is practical about this, by the way. Plenty of women buy their own and then hand it to a sister or a friend and ask to be given it back, which sounds absurd and works perfectly. The rule survives; the shopping gets done.
We brought back two. There is a gold chain with the horn in black, white and coral enamel, long enough to sit below a collar, and a red beaded version for anyone who wants the coral color that started all of this. Both are made in Italy and both are $55, which is the least interesting thing about them.
If you have someone in mind, you already know what to do. If you are looking at one for yourself, do it anyway and then find somebody to hand it to you. The rest of what came back is in the accessories.
She travels to Italy each season to hand-select the boutique's collection.
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