amuletsCimarutacimaruta

said chee-mah-ROO-tah; plural cimarute

also: sprig of rue · cima di ruta

amuletRome and ItalyDiasporaItaly United States of Americaconfidence mediumneeds checking

A silver sprig of rue with charms on the ends of its branches. From a central stalk the branches radiate and each one blossoms into a different object: a rose, a hand holding a wand or a sword, a flaming heart, a fish, a crescent moon, a snake, an owl, a plumed medieval helmet, a vervain blossom, a dolphin, a cock, an eagle. One cimaruta might carry a key, a dagger, a blossom and a moon and no more. Most are double-sided and fairly large — some almost four inches across.

cited

Neapolitan cimaruta, from Italian cima di ruta, 'sprig of rue' — cima 'top, tip' plus ruta, the flowering medicinal herb the whole charm is shaped as. cited

When

documented from 1899; still made still carried cited

Period	Documented from the turn of the twentieth century
How the date is known	textual — a dated text describes it
Note	This dates the first writing, not the object. The earliest dated items in the source are Leland's Aradia of 1899 and Günther's structural study of 1905. The charm is older than both and this record does not guess by how much — the bar on the timeline is a floor, not a start.

Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.

The thing itself

Form	Pendant
Made of	Silver
Goes	At the neck · On a cradle
Made by	silversmiths; no restriction on who may wear one is recorded
Colour	silver
Retired	no — it is kept
Note	The source says most are double-sided and fairly large, some almost four inches in width. That is a description of the largest examples, not a typical dimension, so no length is entered. Modern casts are also made in bronze and pewter.

What its carriers say it stops

Reported, attributed, not tested here. Each row below is somebody's claim, with their name on it.

The evil eye — harm carried by a look, often an admiring one citedsaid by Italian wearers, who name the harm mal'occhio
Harm to a child — harm to an infant or a small child; common across the atlas, though not the largest class in it — see /story/most-of-them-are-for-children/ citedsaid by the same practice, in which the charm is hung above an infant's bed rather than worn

The story

The cimaruta is worn round the neck or hung above an infant's bed, and what it is hung against is named in Italian: mal'occhio, the evil eye. Which charms go on the branches varies by region of origin, and the form is particularly associated with southern Italy.

The piece has been studied as a structure rather than as a symbol. R. T. Günther published "The Cimaruta: Its Structure and Development" in Folk-lore in 1905, working on how the branches and their charms are put together and how that arrangement changed.

There is a live argument about whose object it is. Some practitioners of the neopagan religion of witchcraft called Stregoneria or Stregheria treat the cimaruta as a survival of an older Italian magic tradition, of the kind Charles Leland described in his 1899 Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches, which claimed a pagan witch-cult still active in Italy. Raven Grimassi, in The Cimaruta: And Other Magical Charms from Old Italy (2012), argues the cimaruta was originally a witches' charm, a sign of membership in what he calls the Society of Diana, later taken over by Italian folk magic, with Christian symbols added to the original pagan ones. Wikipedia's own account of the same material describes the cimaruta as alleged to be in borrowed use among self-identified Italian-American witches, which is a different claim about the same objects. This atlas reports both and settles neither; what is not in dispute is that the charm is worn in southern Italy and by descendants of Italian emigrants, against the eye, and that some of its branches carry Christian imagery.

cited

How it is made and carried

Cast, commonly in silver, as a single piece: stalk, branches, and the charms that terminate them. Some modern versions are cast in bronze or pewter. Worn on a cord or chain at the neck, or hung over the bed of a child too young to wear one.

cited

Now

Still cast and sold, in Italy and in the Italian-American market, in silver and in cheaper alloys, and sold alongside books that make the Stregheria claim for it. Inference — the object's present-day buyers are not the same population as its nineteenth-century wearers, and the argument recorded above is mostly an argument between the two.

inference