Where Violence and Love Meet: Honour and Italian Society

This chapter is an exploration of southern customs of love, courtship, and marriage. The notion of honour, strong in the southern regions and particularly Sicily and Calabria at least up to the late 1960s, strongly shaped courtship and marriage. Since family honour was measured by the sexual purity of unmarried daughters, young women’s lives were often tightly controlled. Honour crime, elopement, and kidnap marriage were the outward and most extreme signs of these customs and attitudes. The second part of chapter moves away from the diary and memoirs because of the difficulty in finding sources that both write openly about such experiences, and are willing to be published. Film was a medium that was increasingly used to draw attention to such customs, although crime reportage and the courtroom and are the real arena of this chapter. The well-known but seldom explored case of Franca Viola forms the core of the chapter’s second part. Kidnapped in 1965 with the aim of forcing her into marriage, Franca Viola was the first Sicilian woman to refuse to marry her kidnapper and by implication to have him prosecuted. The trial of Filippo Melodia and his accomplices in 1966 saw competing definitions of love and honour on trial in the Sicilian courtroom, each connected to different ideas of what it meant to be Italian, Sicilian, and modern. Although the trial was a great public victory for Sicilian women, with Melodia found guilty and sentenced to prison, a closer look at the sources suggests that, in private, attitudes were slower to change.