“Ciao, what are you up to?” Flavia says while looking at me and checking if I have any white hair, if my dress is this season’s or a couple of years old, and whether I have gained weight or not. “Nothing much, and you? How are you all?” I reply, while checking basically the same things. “So and so, we keep going,” she answers. An Italian will never say “I am fine” or “Things are fantastic.” An Italian is afraid of jealousy and that the person in front may look at her/him evil-ly, with an evil eye, a malocchio. 

Malocchio is a superstition we find especially in the Mediterranean and Near Eastern countries, since ancient times. It is a form of curse transmitted by one’s eyes, believed by many cultures to cause injury or bad luck to the person at whom it is directed. As a curse, the evil eye is most commonly attributed to envy, and is usually cast by staring at or excessively praising.