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You’ve told me many times that Nana Cirmelli knew all about ghosts and spirits and demons,” Angie said as she sat in her mother’s kitchen with a cup of coffee and some hard, round Italian cookies with white sugary icing on top. The cookies were Angie’s favorite, but could only be eaten by dunking them into hot coffee to make them soft enough to avoid breaking a tooth.
“Not only that.” Serefina Teresa Maria Giuseppina Amalfi, all 5’1”, 150 pounds of her shuddered as she said, “She knew about the evil eye!”
Serefina put her forefinger below her eye and pulled down the lower lid—her family’s signal for the evil eye, or malocchio. Angie learned on a recent trip to Italy that old ideas like the evil eye, brought to the US by Italian immigrants in the early 1900’s and still talked about he
