By The European Times | Created at 2026-10-01 07:02:08 | Updated at 2026-10-01 12:22:55
5 hours ago
Alitalia aircraft lacked a seventeenth row—the eighteenth followed the sixteenth. Its successor, ITA Airways, maintained this practice.
Lufthansa removes both the thirteenth and seventeenth rows. When Renault launched the R17 model for the Italian market, it added another “7,” making the car the R177. Hotel room numbering skips straight from sixteen to eighteen.
The number thirteen, however, bothers no one in Italy.
Why?
It is not the Church’s fault.
Suspicion usually falls on the Church first.
The Bible does provide grounds for this: in the Book of Genesis, the Flood begins on the seventeenth day of the second month. Yet, the same Scripture offers evidence to the contrary—the Ark comes to rest on Mount Ararat precisely on the seventeenth day of the seventh month.
There is also a more significant argument. If faith were the cause, the same superstition would…
The fatal anagram
The explanation any Italian will give you if asked why the number seventeen specifically is short and, at first glance, irrefutable.
Seventeen, written in Roman numerals, is XVII. Rearrange the four characters and you get VIXI—the perfect tense form of the verb *vivo*, meaning “I lived.” In other words: I am dead. It sounds so fitting that no one questions the origin of this claim.
God loves odd numbers
The first objection to the theory regarding the superstition’s ancient origins is that the Romans had no issue with odd numbers—quite the contrary.
In the eighth eclogue of his *Bucolics*, Virgil recorded a line that is still quoted today: *numero deus impare gaudet*—God delights in the odd number.
The line was not written by chance; in the song, an enchantress wraps a figurine of her beloved in three threads of three colors and circles the altar three times. The odd number represents strength, potency, and blessing.
Before Caesar’s reform, Roman months—with a single exception—had an odd number of days: either thirty-one or twenty-nine. Only February, the month of purification and the dead, was assigned twenty-eight.
The “black days” of the Roman calendar
The second objection is more significant. The Romans had their own “bad” days, and ancient authors have listed them by name.
Verrius Flaccus describes them in *On the Meaning of Words*—a work known to us only through later authors. Aulus Gellius devotes a chapter to them in *Attic Nights*.
Macrobius revisits the subject in *Saturnalia*, noting that the ancients considered certain days unfit for any undertaking and thus gave them the ominous designation “black days”—*dies atri*. Three dates divide the Roman month: the Kalends (the first day), the Nones (the fifth or seventh), and the Ides (the thirteenth or fifteenth); all other days are reckoned in relation to them. The days immediately following the Kalends, Nones, and Ides are considered unlucky.
In *Roman Questions*, Plutarch asks why precisely these days are deemed unsuitable for travel or leaving home. The answer cited by most scholars—including Livy—is that on the day following the Ides of the month of Quintilis, military tribunes led out the army, were routed by the Gauls at the Allia River, and the city was lost.
Suetonius notes in *The Deified Augustus* that the emperor was particular about certain dates: he would not set out on a journey the day after a market day, nor would he undertake important business on the Nones.
Calendars, the writings of Roman scholars, the personal habits of the *princeps*. The number seventeen appears nowhere.
The Mysterious Legion
There remains one final piece of evidence considered irrefutable: Legions XVII, XVIII, and XIX were destroyed in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD, and their numbers never appeared again in the Roman army.
There are two problems with this theory. The first is that the existence of the seventeenth legion is merely a hypothesis. Unlike the eighteenth and nineteenth, it is not attested in any surviving literary text; it is known only from a highly ambiguous inscription that must be read backwards.
Its existence is assumed because Augustus’s legions were numbered from one to twenty-two, and a gap at precisely that point would be inexplicable. The number that supposedly terrified the Romans is a reconstruction by modern historians.
The second problem is apparent even without specialized knowledge. Three legions perished in the Teutoburg Forest, not just one. If the disaster had given rise to a numerical superstition, Italians today would not avoid just a single number.
Who Invented the Superstition?
Neapolitan *Smorfia*—the traditional system for interpreting dreams and events—regards the number seventeen as a bad omen. In Italy, Friday the seventeenth plays the role that Friday the thirteenth does elsewhere.
It has not been established when or by whom the anagram VIXI was linked to the number seventeen. All indications suggest that the superstition arose later. The anagram did not create it; rather, it explains it. And because the explanation appears ancient, no one checks whether it is true.
The result: airlines, a car manufacturer, and a host of hotels are changing their numbering because of a play on words for which there is not a single ancient witness.
Illustrative photo: pexels-angela-chacon-140940805-16336087
