Six is chella ca guarda 'nterra, the one that looks at the ground. It is a euphemism for the female genitals, and both Italian and Neapolitan reference lists gloss it that way without embarrassment.
The interesting thing is the construction. The smorfia does not name the body part; it describes a posture and lets the listener finish the sentence. The same trick runs through the board at 29, at 30, at 67. A game called out loud at a family table needed a vocabulary that could be said in front of children and understood by everyone else, and this is what that vocabulary looks like.
- 6
- Chella ca guarda 'nterra
- the one that looks at the ground
- Row 1–10 of the tabellone
Where the figure comes from
The figure is a riddle rather than a symbol, so there is nothing to trace: the pairing with 6 carries no recorded reason.
Other things filed on 6
In Neapolitan life
Six carries the most-played line in nineteenth-century Naples. Matilde Serao, in Il ventre di Napoli (1884), named «l'ambo famoso, sei e ventidue» — six and twenty-two — as a pair the city staked every week out of obligation rather than hope, and recorded what happened the year it finally came up: the government paid out two million lire in five- and ten-lire wins and «tutta Napoli si è coperta di tavolelle», the whole city sat down to dinner on it, then went back to playing the following Saturday.
6 in the smorfia — frequently asked
Literally 'the one that looks at the ground'. It is a standing Neapolitan euphemism for the female genitals, and the smorfia keeps the euphemism rather than the word.
Because the numbers were called aloud at a family table. The figure had to be sayable in front of a child and legible to an adult.