เครื่องรางชีมารูตา (กิ่งต้นรูเครื่องรางอิตาลี)Cimarutacimaruta

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.

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.

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.