Unlucky for some! Superstition and corruption!

In the Italian conversation class we have been reading and talking about Totò Riina, the mafia boss who died very recently, on Friday 17th November.

Friday 17th is the Italian equivalent of our Friday 13th. Our Italian teacher did not provide much of an explanation for this superstition so I did a little research. I already had an explanation for Friday. It was the day Christ was crucified. This also works for Friday 13th. We have 13 as the unlucky number, by the way, because Judas was the 13th disciple. Lots of superstations go back to religion. So why the 17th in Italy? According to some sources, it goes back to ancient Rome. In Roman numerals 17 is XVII. If you play round with the order of the letters you get VIXI, Latin for “I have lived”, with the implication “My life is over”. Well, it’s a theory. Add to that the fact the great flood, the one for which Noah built the ark and improbably filled it with breeding lairs of all animals, is supposed to have happened on the 17th day of the second month of the year. There you go!

Apparently Alitalia do not have a row 17 on their planes just as some American hotels do not have a 13th floor. The date is understandably avoided for weddings. Renault sold its "R17" model in Italy as "R177." Finally at the Cesana Pariol the bobsleigh, luge, and skeleton track in Cesana, Italy, turn 17 is named "Senza Nome”. I suppose it’s always good to hedge your bets. However, I doubt that many teenagers would skip over their 17th birthday and forego the presents!

If Friday 17th pops up in November, as this year, it is extra unlucky because November also has All Saints’ Day, November 1st, and All Souls’ Day, November 2nd. When November includes Friday 17th, it is knowns as the Month of the Deceased. It was certainly a bad day this year for Totò Riina.

In Spain and Spanish-speaking countries, and possible also Greece, Tuesday 13th is the unlucky day. One explanation is that the Spanish for Tuesday is “martes”, which is also the Spanish for Mars, God of War. On Tuesday 13th May 1453 Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople, although why this would so upset Spain is a different matter. Also Tuesday is the third day of the week and, as my mother firmly believed, bad things go in threes.

My research also gave me a bit of linguistic information. If someone looks gloomy, you can ask "Qué pasó?" (What’s the matter?) and the stock answer is “martes” (Tuesday). Which seems to me a better exchange than the English “What’s up?” - “The sky”.

And, a last comment in this topic, the Italians combine Friday and Tuesday in a proverb: “Né di venere, né di marte ci si sposa, né si parte, né si da principio all'arte!" It means “Neither on Friday nor on Tuesday should one marry, set off on a journey, or start something new”.

Getting back to Totò Riina, capo dei capi, boss of bosses, mafia king, he was, as they say in many parts of the UK, a right one. He killed his first victim at age 18, served part of a sentence for that, and went on to kill many more, including being involved in the death of anti-mafia campaigner and judge Giovanni Falcone in 1993. Sentenced in absentia to umpteen life-sentences, he lived many years in hiding. This did not prevent him from running the Sicilian mafia nor from being present for the birth if his four children at one of the best clinics in Palermo. He was only captured when he was betrayed to the police by mafiosi, probably because they had someone lined up to replace him.

Most striking in all of this was the amount of collaboration between police and mafiosi and local government. Lots of tangled threads held all the elements together. No wonder they are still working on it. And Totó, who was rather proud of his life’s work, took his secrets to the grave with him. 

Incidentally, or coincidentally, Phil and I have been watching a Spanish thriller/detective/crime series: “Sé quien eres” - “I know who you are”. A high-flying, highly successful lawyer loses his memory in a car crash. At the same time one of his students, a young woman, disappears. The mystery is solved after many twists and turns and red herrings and blind alleys. Much depends on the lawyer being a rather cold-blooded creature, prepared to do anything to protect the life he wants to lead, starting the whole business off by shooting someone who was blackmailing him for, guess what, having bribed a jury about twenty years previously to find in his favour! No more details; you might like to watch it!

It really was not a good advertisement for the Spanish legal system. Not only was the reptilian baddy lawyer prepared to manipulate facts and falsify evidence, but even the goodies lied about stuff at the drop of a hat and advised their clients to lie, helping them invent stories and coaching them on how to sound convincing. Corruption right, left and centre!

How reassuring to live in a country where such corruption could not happen, where the Prime Minister’s husband would never benefit from off shore tax havens and the national television company could not possibly be accused of spending so much time on news of a royal engagement announcement that items on such things as cuts to benefits could be relegated to a lesser position, probably missed altogether because viewers would grow tired and switch the television off!