A rare collection of entertaining facts on a New Year's theme is complete without mentioning a somewhat strange Italian custom. According to articles and books, in this country, on the night of the holiday, old and broken things fly out of windows and balconies onto the street. And even furniture. We checked if this is true.

Typically, articles report approximately following:

“An Italian New Year’s tradition known throughout the world is throwing furniture out of windows onto the streets. And by the way, not only furniture, but also dishes, utensils, clothes and other unnecessary things. Italians firmly believe that there will be no happiness in the new year if you do not get rid of unnecessary trash.

Where did this unusual and even dangerous (well, what if a frying pan falls on you on New Year’s Eve) tradition come from?

It is generally accepted that the roots of the tradition go back to the times of Ancient Rome and the custom has two interpretations associated with pagan beliefs and superstitions. The New Year is the beginning of a new life, a new cycle, which means that everything that surrounds us must be renewed. Thus the narrow Mediterranean streets are filled with sofas, pots and old torn pants. Another interpretation says that the ancient Romans threw furniture out of windows in the hope of scaring away “evil spirits” with rumble and noise and freeing their home from evil spirits.”

It is natural to assume that the information that is fed to readers around the world year after year did not appear out of nowhere. Moreover, the Italians themselves talk colorfully about the tradition. They love to portray her in movies. For example, in the 1960 film “Joey’s Laughter” with top national cinema actors Anna Magnani and Toto:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z64IEgvDgBY&t=44m11s

In the 1975 cult comedy Fantozzi:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_akR_wcaGA&t=44m2s

And in the Oscar-winning “New Cinema Paradiso” of 1988 directed by Giuseppe Tornatore:

It is important to note that in most documentary sources mentioning this tradition, the proscenium is the south of Italy, in particular Naples. It is about this city in the specified context that Cosimo Arrichiello writes in his book “Italian grief. Life under Mussolini", which takes place in the second quarter of the 20th century.

Here's what tells American officer Bruce Holdt about his time in Naples in the 1970s:

“One of the neighbors warned us not to be outside at midnight because Italians have a tradition of throwing away old things and replacing them with new ones. The next day the street was littered with various things thrown away by the Italians.”

From the evidence presented, we can conclude that at least half a century ago the custom of throwing old things out of the house was quite common. But what about these days?

Ava Laboy Kapo in her 2013 book Traditions/Superstitions from Around the Globe! notes, that this southern Italian tradition has ceased to exist.

In 2018, he was a guest of the Russian project “Our People. Rome" became the Italian Fabio Aquilanti. According to him words, “Nobody throws furniture out of windows on New Year’s Day in Italy; such a tradition existed in the past and only in the south of the country. The custom has survived to this day of giving children a calendar with chocolates before the New Year and decorating the Christmas tree with new toys every year.”

On the Italian resource capodanno.org dedicated to the New Year said:

“This custom is gradually disappearing. To “expose” the past, you can simply throw out too-tight clothes, your grown-up child’s teddy bear, or an old videotape into the bin.”

However, judging by news reports, rumors of the death of the tradition are greatly exaggerated. Welcoming 2020, residents of one of the suburbs of Naples, Castellammare di Stabia, essentially turned the center of the commune into a landfill:

Castellammare, lancio di mobili dai balconi: aperta un'inchiesta

Everything flew to the ground - even furniture and sanitary ceramics. Even the mayor of the city initiated investigation, and scores of residents faced heavy fines. Thousands of citizens subsequently came out for an unplanned cleanup day to return their native streets to a decent appearance.

Oddly enough, this somewhat wild custom already in more civilized times migrated to the Republic of South Africa, or more precisely, to one of the most criminal areas of Johannesburg - Hillbrow. Once, one of the local passers-by was even killed by a refrigerator. But there, objective reasons led to the emergence of tradition. When apartheid fell in the mid-1990s, many whites migrated from then-fashionable Hillbrow to the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, to private homes surrounded by electric fences and armed guards. The city was flooded with representatives of the indigenous population, who previously did not even have the right to move here freely, and now they are reaching out for housing and work. Squatters seized apartments in high-rise buildings and began to dispose of other people's property as if it were their own. So Hillbrow became a symbol of rampant crime, and throwing away furniture on New Year's Eve became a kind of act of self-expression. However, in recent years, the sad consequences of this tradition have been minimized due to the presence of a large number of police officers.

Thus, the Italian tradition of throwing old objects out of windows on New Year's Eve still exists - although it is concentrated in the south of the country. Even there these days the practice cannot be called widespread, and it rarely comes to big things. However, the custom is still alive.