The Monstrefact: Monaciello

In this episode of the Monstrefact, Robert discusses the Neapolitan sprite known as Monaciello or the little monk...

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hi. My name is Robert Lamb and this is the
Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow
Your Mind, focusing on mythical creatures, ideas and monsters in time.
When I was a kid, my aunt gave me a
number of volumes from the Time Life Enchanted World book series,
which was originally published between the years nineteen eighty four

(00:32):
and nineteen eighty seven. I love these books growing up,
and in recent years I've been steadily accumulating the volumes
that I missed out on because I didn't have a
complete collection when I was a kid. Over Christmas, my
family gave me the nineteen eighty five volume Dwarves, and
it of course contains some excellent retellings of Norse mythology.

(00:52):
There's some tales of mining spirits, which we have of
course discussed on the show before, and like all volumes
of the world, Dwarves contains excellent artwork, including a number
of dwarf illustrations by the legendary Wayne Anderson. This is
the guy who illustrated the nineteen seventy nine book Flight
of Dragons, which was made into an animated film that

(01:14):
we've discussed on Weird House Cinema. There's a section in
the book titled a Sampling of Dwarf types, and this
is where we see multiple Wayne Anderson illustrations, and one
illustration and in particular, depicts a slightly mustachioed but otherwise
clean shaven dwarf dressed in red cardinal robes and a
wide brimmed grillo hat. He holds a staff and stands

(01:38):
beside an open treasure chest. This is the Munachello or
little Monk of Naples, Italy, as the art indicates. He
was said to guard hidden treasure and would part with
some of it only to reclaim his splendid hat should
someone be lucky or tricky enough to steal it from him.

(01:58):
He could also be a bit of a trickster himself,
wealth stealing a person's clothes or even pinching them, we're told. So,
having read this, and not being familiar with this particular spirit,
I wanted to learn more. So I turned to a
few different texts. I turned to eighteen ninety three's Folklore
Volume four, edited by Jacobs at All and published by

(02:20):
the Folklore Society. They cite the seventeenth century Neapolitan fairy
tale collection Pentemeroni by Italian poet Jean Bautista Basila as
a key resource. The authors mentioned that the whole house
could sometimes become abandoned due to the nuisance of the
occupying Monticello, and that these little people otherwise lived in

(02:43):
the ravines of coastal Sorrento. As translator Nancy L. Canepa
points out in her translation of Basila's text that Monticello
can largely be thought of as a household or kitchen spirit,
engaging in both assistance and mischief. On the assistant side,
the spirit might aid the ladies of the house with
warnings of disaster, cures for illness, lottery numbers, and even

(03:08):
the location of buried treasure. I guess the lottery number
is kind of an upgrade of the tradition of bury
treasure information. The men of the house, however, would experience
none of these benefits, and instead have to put up
with them on a cellow, occasionally sneaking into their wife's bed.
General household mischief was said to consist of water faucets
and stoves mysteriously turning on or off, disappearing objects, and

(03:32):
so forth. So in some tellings quite beneficial. In other tellings, however,
the entity takes on a darker nature. In twenty twenty
three's Souls of Naples Corporeal Ghosts and Spiritual Bodies in
Early Modern Naples by ottore Vari, the author classifies the
entity as a kind of anti clerical incubus, a male

(03:55):
sex demon closely aligned with dreams and the experience of
night terrors, and in this case said to be linked
to melancholy. Tune in for additional episodes of the Monster, Fact,
The Artifact, or Anomali Stupendium each week. As all ways.
You can email us at contact at Stuffdblow your Mind
dot com.

Speaker 1 (04:24):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.