Conclusion

Opening with an instruction issued just days after the Fadda trial by Italy’s Minister of Justice about ‘emotional management’ of legal spaces, the book’s conclusion reinforces the notion of courts of law as emergent emotional arenas in Liberal Italy. Although the court is the most concrete of emotional arenas to be explored by this book, the conclusion returns to the ways in which documents brought together by the prosecution’s investigation provided the historiographical means to extend the notion outward to less exceptional elements of life, love, and death in 1870s Italy. These rich sources not only shone light on unfamiliar aspects of Italian social history, they illuminated historical processes of emotional encounter, negotiation, navigation, experiment, management, and evolution, within a range of distinctive social spaces, mostly real, but some imagined or virtual. A brief epilogue summarizes what is known of the fates of the three accused in the trial for Giovanni Fadda’s murder.

Arena or Temple?

States anxious to wrest power from religious authorities viewed their courts of law as quasi-sacred spaces, often characterizing them as a form of ‘temple’ to signal the reverential emotional style required within. Foregrounding the emotional overlap between religious and legal spaces, this chapter portrays Rome’s Court of Assizes during the Fadda murder trial as both secular temple and emotional arena with great symbolic value for Liberal Italy. The argument is contextualized against analysis of the symbolic role of law at crucial stages in the development of other states, particularly England and France. After unification, Italian courts were opened to the public, in some cases for the first time. The civic audience in legal hearings, especially in criminal cases, was a fundamental tenet of Italy’s liberal ideology. The chapter analyses public participation in the Fadda trial against the background of a state’s need to engage its citizens in spaces and rituals that were unmistakably identified with the nation. The Fadda trial’s fascination both helped and hindered the state’s cause, drawing great crowds but provoking emotions that threatened to blur the line between dignified court and popular arena. The trial lasted a month and dominated the nation’s newspapers, drawing Italians from all over the peninsula into the drama in Rome. Ultimately the event was an opportunity to establish the contours of a new type of social space, a new emotional arena, for a new nation.

Arenas of Mortality

Grief and other reactions to death—among the most profound emotions humans ever experience—are inevitably mediated by cultural and official structures. This chapter explores responses to deaths encompassed by the book’s narrative, setting them against historical dynamics such as the Italian state’s need for public emotional ‘investment’, tension between the state and the Catholic Church, and the rise of scientific, forensic approaches to death. These dynamics led to the development of novel emotional arenas for the shaping and staging of emotions provoked by death. The chapter begins with the demise of Italy’s king, Victor Emanuel II, which gave rise to the nation’s first state funeral. Already closely analysed by historians, the event is re-examined as part of the book’s argument, with the suggestion that Rome became a distinctively secular emotional arena on the occasion of the funeral: officials made conscious use of social spaces to shift popular associations of death away from the Church and towards the state. Fadda’s presence at the funeral links the king’s death to his own, nine months later. The violence of the crime that took his life, excogitated and executed by Pietro Cardinali and others, resulted in very specific contexts for emotional responses. These include journalistic discussions, the morgue in which the autopsy on Fadda’s body took place, and the funeral, which resembled a miniature version of the king’s state funeral. In addition to grief, the funeral was also the scene of bitterness, indignation, and subtly expressed desires for judicial ‘revenge’.

Intimate Arenas

Beginning with their wedding in Naples in 1871, this chapter examines the emotional relationship between Giovanni Fadda, a captain of the Italian army originally from Sardinia, and his wife Raffaella Saraceni, daughter of a well-to-do Calabrian family. Based on family correspondence and eye-witness accounts, the argument is that the couple represented an emerging model of a marital emotional arena, one that represented united Italy’s modernizing vision. Fadda’s work as a military official required postings in remote parts of the new nation, and the couple needed to be more emotionally self-sufficient than those whose lives were embedded within stable networks of extended families. The realities of modern married life were particularly difficult for Raffaella, who was repeatedly drawn back to the older style of emotional arena represented by her family of origin in Calabria. Effectively, she rarely lived with her husband, despite his efforts to create emotionally secure domestic spaces as a framework for their marriage. Sexual difficulties are also hinted at by the battle-wound which earned Fadda a medal, and local gossip. The chapter traces the eventual breakdown of the relationship, and analyses the couple’s emotional responses through their letters. Ideas of sentiments within marriage expressed by the couple, close relations (particularly Raffaella’s mother and Giovanni’s brother), as well as a range of local observers, give a sense of how Italians saw marriage and the family as an emotional arena undergoing change during a time of cultural and political transition in the nation’s early history.

Virtual Arenas

The love affair between Pietro Cardinali and Raffaella Saraceni suspected by public opinion appears likely to have been real in the light of this chapter, which explores Cardinali’s relationships with women who had fallen in love with him in the circus arena. Moving beyond the restraint of earlier cultural-history approaches to private letters, the chapter is based upon more than forty passionate love letters written by women from various points in southern Italy, all of whom expressed the desire to marry Pietro. One particular correspondent revealed a great deal of her sentimental inner life as she pursued him assiduously over the course of many months. As a genre, secret love letters exemplify an emotional refuge, allowing escape from the strictures of the prevailing emotional regime. Building on such notions, the chapter argues that these women created their own virtual emotional arenas. The result was a set of imaginary spaces in which otherwise very constrained women took the role of prima donna, freely able to express love and desire. Their letters allow glimpses into the way cultural genres such as novels, the theatre, and opera, may have provided frameworks for these women’s emotional experiences, and their expression in arenas of their own imagining. The chapter draws on the work of literary and cultural scholars, bringing it into contact with the lived experience of ordinary southern Italian women as expressed in their own words. It provides an unusually personal exploration of rarely revealed aspects of Italian female emotional lives.

Introduction

Opening with an account of the 1878 murder in Rome that gave rise to the trial on which the book is based, the introduction presents the key figures of a local emotional drama replayed on a national stage. It contextualizes these figures’ stories within Italy’s recent history, and outlines their geographical origins in the newly unified peninsula. Viewing the episodes of social life revealed by the criminal investigation through an emotions-history lens, the introduction surveys the analytical tools currently available for historians of emotion—such as regimes, communities, and practices—then proposes a new paradigm that conveys a stronger sense of boundaries and human scale: the ‘emotional arena’. These are the social spaces that can be seen to have influence over both the experience and expression of emotions—whether bedrooms, theatres and churches, or legal courtrooms. The introduction then lays out the book’s structure, outlining the way each subsequent chapter explores an example of such an emotional arena. These are the marital home, a nomadic circus based on an extended family, the imaginary arenas created by writers of secret love letters, arenas of grief and mourning, forensic investigations of death, plans for a murder, and finally, the courtroom in Rome where the story culminated.

Arena of Desire

The arrival of a circus in Raffaella Saraceni’s home town in Calabria forms the basis of this chapter, which investigates the intense emotional experiences, particularly desire, evoked within this distinctive social and cultural arena. The circus arts represented by this small provincial troupe, based around an extended family, are contextualized within the broader history of the circus, mostly in the nineteenth century but also reaching back to ancient Roman arenas. Personal testimonies give surprising evidence about the degree of desire experienced and expressed in this arena, particularly by women towards the leading performer, Pietro Cardinali. It appears that Cardinali was the provincial version of more famous contemporary practitioners of the circus arts such as Jules Léotard. The chapter explores evidence about the way Cardinali’s circus performers participated in the social life of a small Calabrian town during their month-long visit, which provides means to think more generally about the cultural and social dynamics of southern Italian provincial life in the 1870s. Forensic evidence also supports exploration of the emotional ‘regime’ within the circus family, in which male desire and female fear were central. Cardinali and his sister Antonietta were favoured guests at soirées held in Raffaella Saraceni’s family home, and it was not long before the town’s gossip mill, or voce pubblica (public voice), became firmly convinced that Raffaella, now estranged from her husband, had herself embarked upon a love affair with Pietro Cardinali.