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.

‘Forgive Me, Love…It Was Stronger than I am’: Negotiating Intimacy and Sexuality

This chapter explores intimacy and sexuality in courtship. The ordinary experiences of the diaries and memoirs are set against the (somewhat) differing codes of morality dictated by the Catholic Church, the Communist Party (PCI), and mass culture so that we can see how people often measured their choices and experiences against their ideas of how a model man or woman should behave. We see how the rituals, rules, and surveillance common in upper- and middle-class courtships in the 1950s often left little room for intimacy. Meanwhile, the piazza, a common site of courtship in most towns and cities, was all too often about display rather than real communication. By the late 1950s, the economic boom was beginning to open up new spaces of leisure and intimacy for young Italians, particularly the beach and the car. As couples began to spend more time out of the home together, courtship was becoming both more public and more private, with these new spaces providing more space for intimacy and sexuality, with increasingly shared leisure and communication between the sexes.

Introduction

The introduction sets out the context of post-1945 Italian society and the impact of the economic miracle of the late 1950s and 1960s on the lives of ordinary Italians. Since the book is based on the examination of almost 150 unpublished diaries and memoirs of ordinary Italians, there is a discussion of these sources and how they are used in the book. Emotions are also central to the argument of the book and the introduction sets the book’s approach to love, honour and jealousy firmly within the history of the emotions.

Conclusion: Individuals, Families, and Nation

At the heart of the book are intimate experiences and ordinary lives. The evidence amassed, especially in Chapters 3–5, also tells us a little and perhaps even a lot about how Italians were coming to view themselves as a nation. By the 1960s, Italy had cast off the shadow of fascism and begun to project itself as a self-confident, modern country. This concluding chapter offers some thoughts on how love, honour, and jealousy were not just personal experiences but part of the national stories that Italians told about themselves, in an effort to forge a modern identity to suit the new Italy of the economic miracle.

‘Who to Choose?’ Finding a Suitable Marriage Partner

This chapter explores how young Italians met and chose their marriage partners, drawing primarily on the evidence from diaries and memoirs. One of the key themes of this chapter is how and why men and women remembered courtship, love, and marriage differently. Men tended to describe strong, open, and definite feelings of love in courtship, while women were much more likely to recount doubt, hesitation, ambivalence, or indifference. Reaching adulthood in post-war Italy had very different meanings for men and women, with men typically leaving home for military service and migration while women were more likely to remain with their families until their wedding. Love, marriage, home, and family thus had different meanings in their lives. While arranged marriages were becoming less common in these decades, the strong role played by family in courtship meant that it was often difficult to distinguish an arranged marriage from one that was not. With the rise of mass culture, men and women also began to measure their own experiences against romantic ideals, often to see them falling short. Experience of illness and disability marked many courtships, especially in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when malaria, tuberculosis, and pneumonia were common. In some cases this proved to be a barrier to marriage, although attitudes were beginning to change in the late 1950s. Class was also crucial in determining suitability, although it was family that was the ultimate arbiter.

‘The Marriage Outlaws’: Experiences of Marriage Breakdown Before Divorce

This chapter charts experiences of marriage breakdown and attitudes towards separation from the late 1940s to the 1970s. Although divorce was not legal until 1970, legal separations were permitted in this period. This chapter thus makes use of evidence from a case study of legal separations in late 1940s and 1950s Turin and from a smaller sample of diaries and memoirs that provide a broader geographical picture. While many of these writers separated in the 1970s, 1980s, and later, this chapter argues that the roots of breakdown can frequently be found in the economic miracle years, when the growing media focus on romantic love often did not match up to the reality of married life. Just as women were more likely to be ambivalent about their wedding, they were much more likely than men to ask for a separation or divorce. What we see also in these years is perhaps not simply greater dissatisfaction in marriage, but new languages to comprehend and give shape to it. The idea of marriage for love was key to the divorce campaigns, although the reality was that it was still very difficult for a woman to leave her marriage even up to the 1970s. While we see alternative narratives about love, marriage, and commitment developing from the unofficial culture around the post-war PCI to 1968, this chapter shows how work and feminism often gave women the tools they needed to leave their marriages.

‘Love Means Jealousy’: A Jealousy Epidemic in Post-war Italy?

This chapter explores how the behaviour and attitudes associated with honour were made more acceptable in the late twentieth century by being repackaged in the emotional language of jealousy, as couples increasingly married for love rather than family reasons. When we widen the lens to look for jealousy rather than honour, we see that in contrast to the media picture, the masculine controlling behaviour associated with jealousy and honour was widespread everywhere in Italy and not just in the south. Indeed, when we turn to the mass media—magazines and film in particular—we get the impression of what might be termed a jealousy epidemic in Italy. This chapter uses a diverse range of sources—from film, magazines, and crime reportage to diaries and memoirs—to trace how people thought about jealousy and how they experienced it in these years. We will see how it was often represented as illness or madness and could also be experienced as such. Indeed, much more than love, jealousy was likely to be described as an intense bodily experience. It was also something that many Italians were keen to distance themselves from and to combat, whether in society at large or in themselves.