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What does “fai una smorfia” mean in Italian?

Fai una smorfia — “make a face” — is one of the challenges in this twins game, and smorfia is the word for exactly that: a grimace, a scrunched-up, exaggerated facial expression, whether it’s pulled for comic effect, disgust, or pain. It’s a step beyond a simple faccia buffa (“funny face”) — a smorfia twists the features on purpose, the kind of face that gets a reaction.

The same word names La Smorfia, Naples’s famous tradition of turning dream imagery into lottery numbers from 1 to 90 — dream of a face pulling a grimace, or of almost anything else, and there’s a number for it. The name’s origin is debated, but one common theory ties it to Morfeo, the Greek god of dreams — a fitting link between a face and the dream-book that shares its name.