Shadowy underground origins of Italian 'tombola' bingo still alive in Naples

In a cavernous room of the Tombola Vajassa bar, located down a narrow flight of stone stairs off a side street in Naples, 30 or so mostly women sit crammed around small tables, with what look like bingo cards laid out in front of them.

On a small stage, a towering figure in a cascading curly wig and silver sequined top, who goes by the name Lady Taboo, calls out images and their corresponding numbers: "Laughter, 19. Death that talks, 48. The hunchback, 53." 

As the images get called out, players cross off numbers on their cards, while Lady Taboo cracks jokes and teases the crowd in a Neapolitan slang so fast-paced it's hard for non-locals who speak Italian to follow.

The game being played is tombola, a three-centuries-old version of bingo, born in this sprawling, boisterous southern Italian city.

It's a cryptic game of luck with underground roots of being run by women and often hosted by members of Naples' non-binary "third gender," the femminielli. 

But partly because of its shadowy origins, and the rise of modern bingo halls, its future is uncertain.

"In the north of Italy where I come from, tombola is just a game we play with the family at Christmas time. But here in Naples, it's full of superstition, jokes and elaborate stories," said Giulia Gratti, 23, a member of the crowd at Tombola Vajassa.

Indeed, the tombola played by most Italians is a much beloved, squeaky clean, Yuletide tradition. 

But the Naples version is a reflection of the ancient history of this sprawling, boisterous and crime-pocketed city where the game sprang up in the early 18th century as a way for impoverished people to win small stakes in a game of luck.

At the time, Naples was under Spanish rule and King Charles II banned the public lottery (or lotto) for religious reasons. To get around the prohibition, Neapolitans moved the game of chance inside their homes, devising a new set of rules that became tombola.

For centuries, tombola has been played in small, often one- or two-room street-level apartments in crowded neighbourhoods called i bassi, in the lower areas of the city, closer to the Bay of Naples.

"Because it was played inside people's homes — the domestic sphere where Neapolitan women looked after children while doing piecework for leather goods or clothing — it became a purely female game," said Alessandra Broccolini, an anthropologist at Rome's Sapienza University. 

"Men, when they weren't working, played cards at a bar or club and were only home if they were sick or under house arrest."

The game was woven not only into the social fabric of the city's poorer areas, she explained, but was also an integral part of the local female economy.