One is l'Italia, the country itself. Every other square on the Neapolitan board holds something you could meet in a street or a kitchen or a dream. The first holds a nation, which makes it the odd figure out and the one people ask about most.
The grid runs 1 to 90 because the lotto wheel does, and the tombola board copies it exactly. So the opening square is the first number called out of the basket on Christmas Eve, and the caller says l'Italia rather than uno. That is the whole convention: the number is announced by its picture.
- 1
- L'Italia
- Italy
- Row 1–10 of the tabellone
Where the figure comes from
Italy is not the original figure, and there is a dated book that proves it. Michele Zezza's La smorfia, printed in Naples in 1835, opens its list with Sole, the sun. Somewhere between that edition and the modern ones the sun was replaced by a country, which puts the change after 1835 and makes the usual explanation — that one stands for a nation unified — at least chronologically possible. No source records who made the swap or when.
Other things filed on 1
In Neapolitan life
The Sicilian board disagrees outright. Where Naples puts Italy, Trapani puts Pippineddu, little Joseph, glossed by the local folk-traditions association as the ordinary man who opens the series the way life opens. Two boards, ninety squares each, and they part company on the very first one.
1 in the smorfia — frequently asked
The reading usually offered is that one stands for the country as a single body. What is certain is that it replaced something else: the 1835 Naples edition by Michele Zezza has the sun on square one.
No. The Sicilian smorfia recorded in Trapani gives 1 as Pippineddu, little Joseph, the common man. Naples and Sicily disagree on roughly two thirds of the ninety squares.