“Si vene ‘o Mammone”. Storia, caratteristiche e funzioni di un rituale magico: la ninna nanna

Abstract

In the ancient civilisations of Magna Graecia, lullabies were considered an integral part of childcare: They were sung by mothers, other women in the family or nurses, with the aim of soothing and inducing babies to sleep. Plato, for instance, reports how mothers, in order to put their children to sleep, would move them in their arms and intone some melody, almost enchanting them. These ‘nænias’ were also considered a way to protect children from negative influences and malign forces while they were sleeping: An example is the Lament of Danae, versified by Simonides, in which the mother tries to distract little Perseus from the dangers of the sea to which they are abandoned, by rocking him and begging him to sleep. About two millennia later, in the 16th century, another poet, Giovanni  Battista Del Tufo, in his Ritratto delle grandizze, delizie e maraviglie della nobilissima città di Napoli (Portrait of the greatnesses, delights and marvels of the most noble city of Naples), defines lullabies as the “modo del cantare de le nodrici napoletane nel connolare i putti per farli dormire” (“the way of singing of the Neapolitan nuns in lulling the cherubs to sleep”). Again, centuries later, in 1979, it was the Neapolitan singer-songwriter Pino Daniele who revived the genre through his second album of the same name with his song “Ninnanàninnanoè”. From classical antiquity to modern and contemporary times, lullabies have survived, evolved, changed idioms and yet seem to have retained many of their ancestral characteristics. Among these, for example, a magical atmosphere and an apotropaic value seem to be recognised almost as constants, and one might wonder whether this aspect can be considered as a founding and characterising value of this genre of song. The present article, the result of a collaboration between two disciplines (Classical Philology and Sociology of Music), proposes to carry out a historical-literary  investigation on the subject through a diachronic study of the sources that hand down, directly or indirectly, what can be ascribed to the lullaby genre in the Mediterranean basin, from ancient Greece to its colonies in southern Italy, with particular attention on those that developed in the Neapolitan area.