curses

1. Could you be catched by a crisis of dysentery in your car at your first date with the person you're in love with.
2. Could you be left shut in an elevator with Mike Tyson while you are disguised as a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
3. Could you shit in the brambles, clean yourself with nettles and pee on an electrical transformer.
4. Could you eat a tablet of uranium mistaking it for a licorice candy.
5. Could you put your child in the oven and the chicken in the cradle.
6. Could you die of indigestion from sausages and beer and notice that in the afterlife there is Allah
7. Could you marry a pornstar which uses to take his/her work home.
8. Could you become Moslem and be engaged by a salami factory
9. Could you ask a Jehovah's Witness what he/she thinks about religion and could he/she answer to you.
10. Could you be get an electric shock during a black out.
11. Could a lightning loathe to strike you and destroy just your pace-maker.
12. Could a bull mistake you for his favourite cow.
13. Could you become the lover of a police officer's wife and could he notice it.
14. Could you be attacked by just one head louse, but as big as a rottweiler dog.
15. Could you go hunting and shoot your own balls, go angling and catch a drowned, go mushrooming and get the clap.
16. Could a still green face surgeon take you as an experimental animal.
17. Could you lend your house to a splatter film director in order to turn a film.
18. Could you mistake a bottle of super glue for your eyedrop.
19. Could you go to a blind date with Samantha and find there your parish priest.
20. Could your dentist notice that you have a flirt with his wife while he's drilling your teeth.
21. Could you be awarded as "precocious ejaculator of the year"
22. Could you drive on the wrong side on the home-stretch of Monza circuit during the Grand Prix start.
23. Could the pilot of the plane on which you are flying ask you advices on how to give up with alcohol.
24. Could you accept a dinner invitation from your new neighbors and realize too late they are coprophages.
25. Could your kitchen stink toilet and your toilet stink fried fish.

1. I pray mother nature to rot you with hemorrhoids, to give you continuous headaches and shattering nausea, to make you deaf and dumb, dumb but not forever, fuck, dumb but not forever. May your voice sporadically come back for few second in which you say immense bullshit. Alex Drastico (Antonio Albanese)
2. Could you loose all your teeth, could you get just one left, for toothache. quoted by Ferruccio Folkel

May he get as many stabs for as many days are in a year. Ora pro nobis. May he stay so many years in bed until a louse goes around the world. Ora pro nobis. May he get as many strokes for as many eggs as it takes to break St. Peter's dome. Ora pro nobis. May he end up like the lantern, which burns out, falls out of the window and everyone stamps on it. Ora pro nobis. May he end up like the ox, who first is stunned, then slaughtered, and then they dance on it. Ora pro nobis. May he have the destiny of the Easter candle: fire in the head, a pole in the ass and five balls in the chest. Ora pro nobis. Filippo Chiappini - Vocabolario romanesco Roma : Leonardo Da Vinci, 1933. Quoted in: Giuliano Malizia - Proverbi romaneschi - Newton Compton editori, Roma, 1994.

- Te pòzzino ammazzà prima che me ne scordo (may somebody kill you, before I forget it)
- Vatte a fà ammazzà 'a nu bbufelo ca 'nde paga pì ggnende (could you be killed by a buffalo, so it doesn't redress you)
- Pozzi còcia comme la scòla de Veroli (could you burn like the school of Veroli*) (*village close to Sgurgola)
- Vatt'a fa ammazzà denanzi alla porta de casa, così màmmeta 'nte va cerchènno (go make you kill in front of your house door, so your mother does not have to go around looking for your corpse)
- Te pozz'ammulinà comme la serpe (could you be empoisoned like a snake)
- Te pòzzino ammazzà, te e chigliu bboia che te régge all'érta (could you be killed, you and that scoundrel that keeps you standing up [God)]
- Diavolo pòrtio (e si nun po' tracìnio) [may the devil take him away (and if he cannot, may he drag him)]

16 You will be cursed in the city and cursed in the country. 17 Your basket and your kneading trough will be cursed. 18 The fruit of your womb will be cursed, and the crops of your land, and the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks. 19 You will be cursed when you come in and cursed when you go out. 20 The Lord will send on you curses, confusion and rebuke in everything you put your hand to, until you are destroyed and come to sudden ruin because of the evil you have done in forsaking him. 21 The Lord will plague you with diseases until he has destroyed you from the land you are entering to possess. 22 The Lord will strike you with wasting disease, with fever and inflammation, with scorching heat and drought, with blight and mildew, which will plague you until you perish. 23 The sky over your head will be bronze, the ground beneath you iron. 24 The Lord will turn the rain of your country into dust and powder; it will come down from the skies until you are destroyed. 25 The Lord will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You will come at them from one direction but flee from them in seven, and you will become a thing of horror to all the kingdoms on earth. 26 Your carcasses will be food for all the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth, and there will be no one to frighten them away. 27 The Lord will afflict you with the boils of Egypt and with tumors, festering sores and the itch, from which you cannot be cured. 28 The Lord will afflict you with madness, blindness and confusion of mind. 29 At midday you will grope about like a blind man in the dark. You will be unsuccessful in everything you do; day after day you will be oppressed and robbed, with no one to rescue you. 30 You will be pledged to be married to a woman, but another will take her and ravish her. You will build a house, but you will not live in it. You will plant a vineyard, but you will not even begin to enjoy its fruit. 31 Your ox will be slaughtered before your eyes, but you will eat none of it. Your donkey will be forcibly taken from you and will not be returned. Your sheep will be given to your enemies, and no one will rescue them. 32 Your sons and daughters will be given to another nation, and you will wear out your eyes watching for them day after day, powerless to lift a hand. 33 A people that you do not know will eat what your land and labor produce, and you will have nothing but cruel oppression all your days. 34 The sights you see will drive you mad. 35 The Lord will afflict your knees and legs with painful boils that cannot be cured, spreading from the soles of your feet to the top of your head. 36 The Lord will drive you and the king you set over you to a nation unknown to you or your fathers. There you will worship other gods, gods of wood and stone. 37 You will become a thing of horror and an object of scorn and ridicule to all the nations where the Lord will drive you. 38 You will sow much seed in the field but you will harvest little, because locusts will devour it. 39 You will plant vineyards and cultivate them but you will not drink the wine or gather the grapes, because worms will eat them. 40 You will have olive trees throughout your country but you will not use the oil, because the olives will drop off. 41 You will have sons and daughters but you will not keep them, because they will go into captivity. 42 Swarms of locusts will take over all your trees and the crops of your land. 43 The alien who lives among you will rise above you higher and higher, but you will sink lower and lower. 44 He will lend to you, but you will not lend to him. He will be the head, but you will be the tail. 45 All these curses will come upon you. They will pursue you and overtake you until you are destroyed, because you did not obey the Lord your God and observe the commands and decrees he gave you. 46 They will be a sign and a wonder to you and your descendants forever. 47 Because you did not serve the Lord your God joyfully and gladly in the time of prosperity, 48 therefore in hunger and thirst, in nakedness and dire poverty, you will serve the enemies the Lord sends against you. He will put an iron yoke on your neck until he has destroyed you. 49 The Lord will bring a nation against you from far away, from the ends of the earth, like an eagle swooping down, a nation whose language you will not understand, 50 a fierce-looking nation without respect for the old or pity for the young. 51 They will devour the young of your livestock and the crops of your land until you are destroyed. They will leave you no grain, new wine or oil, nor any calves of your herds or lambs of your flocks until you are ruined. 52 They will lay siege to all the cities throughout your land until the high fortified walls in which you trust fall down. They will besiege all the cities throughout the land the Lord your God is giving you. 53 Because of the suffering that your enemy will inflict on you during the siege, you will eat the fruit of the womb, the flesh of the sons and daughters the Lord your God has given you. 54 Even the most gentle and sensitive man among you will have no compassion on his own brother or the wife he loves or his surviving children, 55 and he will not give to one of them any of the flesh of his children that he is eating. It will be all he has left because of the suffering your enemy will inflict on you during the siege of all your cities. 56 The most gentle and sensitive woman among you—so sensitive and gentle that she would not venture to touch the ground with the sole of her foot—will begrudge the husband she loves and her own son or daughter 57 the afterbirth from her womb and the children she bears. For she intends to eat them secretly during the siege and in the distress that your enemy will inflict on you in your cities. 58 If you do not carefully follow all the words of this law, which are written in this book, and do not revere this glorious and awesome name—the Lord your God- 59 the Lord will send fearful plagues on you and your descendants, harsh and prolonged disasters, and severe and lingering illnesses. 60 He will bring upon you all the diseases of Egypt that you dreaded, and they will cling to you. 61 The Lord will also bring on you every kind of sickness and disaster not recorded in this Book of the Law, until you are destroyed. 62 You who were as numerous as the stars in the sky will be left but few in number, because you did not obey the Lord your God. 63 Just as it pleased the Lord to make you prosper and increase in number, so it will please him to ruin and destroy you. You will be uprooted from the land you are entering to possess. 64 Then the Lord will scatter you among all nations, from one end of the earth to the other. There you will worship other gods—gods of wood and stone, which neither you nor your fathers have known. 65 Among those nations you will find no repose, no resting place for the sole of your foot. There the Lord will give you an anxious mind, eyes weary with longing, and a despairing heart. 66 You will live in constant suspense, filled with dread both night and day, never sure of your life. 67 In the morning you will say, "If only it were evening!" and in the evening, "If only it were morning!"-because of the terror that will fill your hearts and the sights that your eyes will see. 68 The Lord will send you back in ships to Egypt on a journey I said you should never make again. There you will offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves, but no one will buy you.
(Deuteronomy, 28)

Callidus effracta nummos fur auferet arca, / prosternet patrios impia flamma lares: / debitor usuram pariter sortemque negabit, / non reddet sterilis semina iacta segis: / dispensatorem fallax spoliabit amica / mercibus extructas obruet unda rates.
A shrewd thief, broken your safe open, will steal your coins, the sacrilegous flames will destroy your hereditary house, the debtor will deny to refund you the lend sum and the interest, the sterile field will not give the sown seed back, a deceiving girlfriend will steal your administrator, the waves will submerge your ships loaded with goods.
Marcus Valerius Martial (approx. 40 - 104 A.D.) Epigrams 5.42 (the translation is mine).

page last updated: May 24th, 2022