Italian horn (cornicello)

Where the horn charm began is disputed. Geopop, citing Alfonso Burgio’s Dizionario delle superstizioni (1993), gives the commonest explanation: the horn’s shape recalls the male organ, and so stood for fertility and, by extension, prosperity, and in Greek and Roman times the horn was thought to stand for the god Priapus. It reports two other theories: that the horn began as a sign of strength, since showing the horns of animals killed on one’s house proved one a good hunter, and that it is a chilli pepper. L’Italo-Americano notes that many people see the phallic symbols on the walls of Pompeii and Herculaneum as the ancestors of today’s cornetti, and says the horn became a household object in the Middle Ages, when goldsmiths and jewellers began to specialise in making and selling it.

Frederick Elworthy, whose book The Evil Eye appeared in 1895, traced the horn to the worship he called Isis-Diana, whose chief attributes were symbolised by the horned moon, and concluded that in his own day horns in one form or another were the commonest of all amulets against the evil eye. In Naples, he wrote, the belief had gone so far that saying the word corno was itself held to protect, and every charm against the evil eye, however elaborate, was called simply “un corno”. A single pendant horn of brass, white metal, silver, coral, pearl or bone hung from the watch-chain of nearly every Italian who wore charms, and horns in crescent and animal forms were as common as blackberries on the harness of Neapolitan horses. A horseshoe might hang beside it, but always in addition to the horn of coral or metal, never in its place. The Science Museum Group holds a horn amulet from Naples of 1860 to 1910, from Henry Wellcome’s collection, coated with wax in imitation of coral.