Contesting Masculinity in Post-Unification Italy: The Murder of Captain Giovanni Fadda.

MURDER trials; FADDA, Giovanni; HISTORY of Rome (Italy), 1870-1945; HISTORY of murder trials; HISTORY of masculinity; CARDINALI, Pietro; SARACENI, Raffaella; ITALIAN national character; NINETEENTH century; HISTORY; SOCIAL history; ACTIONS & defenses (Law)

ROME (Italy); ITALYReport Available

In Rome in 1878, shortly after Italy had established itself as a nation-state, a circus acrobat murdered his lover’s respectably valiant but allegedly impotent soldier-husband. The ensuing court case became one of the causes célèbres of the day. This article argues that much of the trial’s contemporary fascination is explained by the way its central male figures embodied contrasting ideals of masculinity in a nation that was anxious about its collective vigour and legitimacy. In life, the murder victim, Captain Fadda, had displayed all the rectitude and restraint required to fit an emerging model of Italian bourgeois masculinity. Even the cause of his impotence, a battle wound, connoted male virtue. By contrast, the rival for his wife’s affections, an itinerant equestrian artiste, represented a dangerous virility, the more fascinating for being unconstrained by bourgeois responsibilities. Press coverage of the sensational trial paid great attention to the private lives of the central male figures, as well as to their physical and facial characteristics. From the point of view of public representation at least, it becomes clear that masculinity itself was on trial. In this way, a fleeting moment in Italy’s legal history becomes a peephole through which to examine the struggle to define parameters of masculinity in an emerging bourgeois culture that is both distinctively Italian, yet representative of broader European patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]