Lu Malocchio in Ricci’s Lives of the Saints
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The evil eye or malocchio has appeared in the works of a number of Italian-Canadian writers but for most its role has been limited. In Lives of the Saints, however, the first volume of the trilogy of the same name by Nino Ricci, its role is fundamental to the novel’s narrative construction. The central act of the novel, set in a village in southern Italy in the 1960s, is the snakebite received by the protagonist’s mother, Cristina, while she is engaged in adulterous intercourse. She becomes pregnant as a result of this encounter and is ostracised by the villagers who interpret her condition as the consequence of the evil eye, lu malocchiu. The evil eye becomes a symbol of the pain and violence of the behavioural rules and boundaries imposed on women’s flesh. Ricci, the most successful Italian-Canadian author of his generation, uses the concept of malocchio to unmask the implications of traditional patriotic and nostalgic narratives based on women’s sexuality, and eventually to construct a complex narrative of the Italian-Canadian post-migrant experience.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".