Dreaming by Numbers

Everything has its own number, according to the Italian numbers book . For instance, the number 22 represents fools, 18 blood and arena and 36 chestnuts. Italians take this number theory dead seriously and hope to make a little extra money with it. The lottery and bingo sellers profit from this: visits a century-old lottery office in Naples, where everyone drops by to place a bet. A reasoned bet, that is, on the basis of : for example, when someone has had a dream about his father who stepped into a bucket of water, the lottery vendor takes the book out: father is 81, foot is 53, water is 39 and bucket is 4. These will be the numbers to bet with. When a regular customer's brother gets murdered, people even use this incident to stake their bets. The obsession with numbers sometimes takes on hilarious proportions ("which numbers can be derived from a dream about a cockroach with a limp?"), but behind the gambling, there are often tragic stories. A historian sees parallels with Pythagoras' numbers theory, which is kept alive in Italian popular culture. Italians do not want to save money, but prefer to live in the moment. Bucchetti previously made the documentary , about Italy under Berlusconi.