เครื่องรางคอร์นิเชลโล (เขานำโชคอิตาลี)Cornicellocornicello

The cornicello is worn against the evil eye — malocchio — and against bad luck in general, and historically to promote fertility and virility. The harm it answers is described precisely by the people who wear it: the eye is held to strike nursing mothers and their babies, fruit-bearing trees, milking animals and the sperm of men. Those are the forces of generation, and a horn is an answer in kind.

The shape is said to be modelled on an eland horn, for fertility, virility and strength. Its materials carry their own connections in the tradition's own telling: coral is sacred to Venus, goddess of love, fertility, sex and prosperity; silver to Luna, goddess of the moon; the phallic shape and the red colour point to Priapus, a male fertility god; the horn itself is tied to Pan, and the broken goat's horn Zeus filled with fruit and flowers became the cornucopia.

It is a regional object, not a national one. Cornicelli are most often worn by men in southern Italy, above all in Campania, then Lazio, Apulia and Basilicata, and to a lesser extent Sicily and Calabria — and by the descendants of Italian emigrants elsewhere. Dried chili peppers are hung in some southern Italian homes against the same harm, which is how the resemblance became a second charm.

The horn also has a hand. The mano cornuta, the horned hand, is an Italian gesture — and an amulet imitating the gesture — made with the hand levelled or pointing down, usually with a swivelling or oscillating motion, against the same eye.

Cast or carved: gold and silver for the good ones, red coral for the old ones, plastic for the cheap ones, bone and terracotta in between. Pierced at the broad end and hung on a neck chain. It is also hung from the rear-view mirrors of cars — a move the source ties to the older custom of hanging them on draft horses — and in houses. Nothing is recorded about charging it or retiring it.

Made and sold in enormous numbers, in gold at jewellers and in plastic at every tourist stall in Naples, and worn worldwide by people of Italian descent and by people with no connection to Campania at all. Inference — the horn has crossed from a charm against a named harm to a badge of origin, and the two uses are worn on the same chain by the same people without anyone being asked to choose.