Murder Made in Italy: Homicide, Media, and Contemporary Italian Culture

By Ellen Nerenberg

A study of three high-profile Italian murder cases, how they were covered by the media, and what it all says about Italian culture.

Looking at media coverage of three very prominent murder cases, Murder Made in Italy explores the cultural issues raised by the murders and how they reflect developments in Italian civil society over the past twenty years. Providing detailed descriptions of each murder, investigation, and court case, Ellen Nerenberg addresses the perception of lawlessness in Italy, the country’s geography of crime, and the generalized fear for public safety among the Italian population. Nerenberg examines the fictional and nonfictional representations of these crimes through the lenses of moral panic, media spectacle, true crime writing, and the abject body. The worldwide publicity given the recent case of Amanda Knox, the American student tried for murder in a Perugia court, once more drew attention to crime and punishment in Italy and is the subject of the epilogue.

“A fantastic array of literary, cinematic, and oral narratives.” —Stefania Lucamante, Catholic University of America

“Original, engaging, and thought-provoking . . . quite unlike any other existing book in Italian cultural and media studies.” —Ruth Glynn, University of Bristol

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9780253012425

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Making a Killing in Contemporary Italy

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT MURDER—that is, three prominent murder cases in contemporary Italy. Part 1 examines the serial double homicides of couples in flagrante delicto that took place in Florence between 1975 and 1984 and were attributed to the Monster, allegedly Pietro Pacciani, who was tried for these crimes in 1994.¹ Controversy surrounded the trial and the setting aside of his conviction: although Pacciani’s alleged coconspirators were prosecuted, the murders remain unsolved. At the center of Part 2 lies the 2001 double homicide of Susy Cassini and her son, Gianluca De Nardo, in the small northern Italian town of Novi Ligure, for which Cassini’s daughter, Erika, and Erika’s boyfriend, Mauro Omar Fàvaro, were tried and convicted. Finally, Part 3 focuses on the case against Annamaria Franzoni, accused and convicted of the 2002 murder of her son, Samuele, in their Cogne home in the Valle D’Aosta, Italy’s remote northwestern region adjacent to France. Signing a way toward further and future research, the epilogue presents a discussion of the case against U.S. citizen Amanda Knox for the murder of Meredith Kercher, her British roommate in Perugia, where they were both students of Italian. This case challenges the regional and national character of murder in Italy confirmed in each of the three parts.

Murder Made in Italy places these killings in the larger cultural, social, and political context of contemporary Italy, exploring the ways in which the issues each homicide raised were represented in both fictional and nonfictional narratives: press coverage, novels, short stories, television news broadcasts, talk shows, and film. The frenzied attention that surrounded each murder was fed by—and fed into—the recent expansion of the Italian mass media buoyed by Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s domination of it and by the increasing popularity of the true-crime story and other popular literary and film genres.² The enormous fascination these murders elicited presents an important index of changes in Italy and Italian culture in recent decades. Despite Italy’s relatively low murder rate, these killings illuminate a widespread perception of Italian lawlessness and, more subtly, an anxious awareness of cultural change. Each of the murders became an occasion for moral panic, highlighting transformations in contemporary Italian culture and society, including challenges to the conventional Italian family, the myth of Italy as il bel Paese, notions of Italian cultural autonomy from foreign influences, a plummeting birthrate, ramped-up violence among Italian youth, and public safety generally. Significantly, none of these stories was set in the south, commonly considered the location of Italian lawlessness and violence. Rather, these homicides took place in those parts of the country that are typically regarded as orderly and law-abiding. At their core lay symbols that threatened the traditional Italian way of life—sexual predators, abusive and incompetent officials, feral children, foreign migrants, and predatory tourists.

To offer the thickest description possible of each case, Murder Made in Italy works between historical analysis of the event, the law, and cultural expressions, primarily contemporary Italian films and novels.³ A brief look at one of these films, Roberto Benigni’s Il Mostro (The Monster, 1994), the comic actor’s send-up of the 1990s serial murder craze in Italy, offers an example of this book’s method and approach.⁴

Il Mostro opens with a long shot of an apartment complex on a residential street. The low lighting is natural: it is night, with street lamps the only light source. A shrill scream pierces the street’s quiet and signals a series of fast-paced changes. Natural sound gives way to the jolly sound track, Evan Lurie’s rollicking and lighthearted circus theme, recalling some of the melodies Nino Rota composed for Federico Fellini’s films, particularly La Strada and Amarcord. The long shot of the apartment house’s exterior is then replaced by an interior medium shot that shows only the top half of elevator doors as they open and close repeatedly—some object beneath our line of vision is clearly obstructing them. As the opening credits begin to roll, the camera tracks back to show a body on the elevator floor: one of the inert female figure’s legs sticking out from the elevator prevents the doors from closing. The other leg, splayed out on the elevator floor, sports a black stocking that has been ripped away. The dead woman’s head lies outside the frame. (See Figure 0.1.) The message is clear. Violence has happened, deadly sexual violence against an anonymous woman.

FIGURE 0.1. Il Mostro (The Monster) (Roberto Benigni, 1994).

The quick series of changes in camera distance, sound, and framing continues as it switches from live action to animation. Forging a sound bridge to the next scene, the circus-like music plays on, now accompanying an animated cityscape where buildings loom off-kilter, like something out of a grotesque, albeit comical, Expressionist painting. Down the side street comes a shadow. No menacing killer out of an Otto Dix painting appears. Rather, the shadow belongs to a dog—an English bull terrier if the patch on the eye is any indication—that begins comically and indiscriminately to eat everything in sight. Objects both animate and inanimate flee the strangely calm creature: a snail, a flower, a car, an umbrella, a cat that resembles Jerry of the Hanna-Barbera Tom and Jerry cartoon series. The message here, too, is clear: mistaken identity has produced unfounded, albeit comic terror, which has, in turn, produced a level of hysteria that obscures the source of disquiet.

The penultimate sequence of this opening returns to live action and cinematic realism that borders on the documentary. A continuous aerial shot shows apartment buildings in an unnamed city. The red-tiled roofs and the Italian voiceover locate the action somewhere in Italy, but in no more precise a locale than the apartment complex in the establishing shot. A police inspector (Michel Blanc) narrates the crimes of a serial rapist-murderer as the editing intercuts a crime scene with images of a press conference taking place inside police headquarters. Concluding, the inspector states that the murderer is "un tipo comune, qualunque. Dietro quella maschera di banalità c’è un violentatore. C’è un vizioso … dietro quella maschera per bene … c’è un mostro" (a normal man, any man. Behind that mask of normality lies a rapist. Behind that mask of respectability lies … a monster).⁵

The film’s setup is nearly complete. A quick cut takes us from inside police headquarters to a nighttime garden party. A man, shot from behind, fusses over a flowering shrub. Behind him we see mannequins staged next to electric hedge trimmers and lawn mowers. Their stiff limbs recall the lifeless cadaver visible on the elevator floor from seconds before and add to a strange, highly artificial landscaping diorama. The man turns—it is Loris, the character played by Roberto Benigni—and the camera centers him in the frame. He is an image of balance, at the center of his universe—and ours, for as long as we watch this film. As before, the message is clear. Masks, deception, and public terror will play key roles, and Benigni’s character will be at the clownish center of it all.

For decades before winning the 1998 Academy Award for best actor for his role in La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful), Benigni had made his career in stand-up comedy and as a comic actor in films he both wrote and directed. Benigni’s early work depends on the actor’s recognizable Tuscan quotient or, as Italian film historian Lino Micciché has termed it, his effervescenza toscana, or Tuscan effervescence.⁶ This is especially so in a role like Cioni Mario in Giuseppe Bertolucci’s Berlinguer ti voglio bene (I Love You, Berlinguer, 1977).⁷ In this film, Benigni’s unmistakable regional accent, combined with the film’s setting in Prato, the neighboring town to the north of Florence, underscores the pro-Communist political context particular to Tuscany in the mid-1970s. In Johnny Stecchino (1991), which Benigni wrote and directed, the actor stars as Dante, whose marked and identifiable Tuscan speech sharply distinguishes him from Johnny Stecchino, his lookalike and a dangerous Sicilian mafioso.⁸ Johnny Stecchino broke all box-office records in Italy, remaining the most commercially successful film in Italian cinematic history until Benigni’s follow-up, Il Mostro.⁹

This film about a Tuscan ignoramus mistaken for a serial killer struck a familiar chord throughout Italy, where the media had made a killing turning Pietro Pacciani, the presumed Monster of Florence, into a household name. Although critical reception was only lukewarm, Il Mostro nevertheless enjoyed enormous commercial success.¹⁰ Also significant was the timing of the film’s release. Like many of his other films, Benigni scheduled the movie’s premier for October, the month of his birthday (he was born October 27, 1952).¹¹ However, in the case of Il Mostro, an October 1994 release meant that the film premiered one month before the court was to hand down its verdict in the case against Pietro Pacciani.

The plot of Benigni’s film is both the same as and different from the serial sex murders imputed to Il Mostro di Firenze, or the Monster of Florence, and the state’s case against Pacciani. The way Il Mostro satirizes public hysteria, the obsession with psychological profiling, and general police incompetence all echo aspects of the actual case. The film’s lead investigator (Blanc) is obsessed with Americanized types of FBI profiling. He is a thinly disguised satirization of Inspector Ruggero Perugini, the actual case investigator, who had trained at the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico before he was assigned to Florence’s Anti-Monster Squad. At the same time, Il Mostro pulls away from direct comparison with the Monster case. The near-absence of recognizable locales, for example, undermines the comparison with the actual serial murders committed on the bucolic outskirts of Florence. Geographically speaking, although Benigni’s broad Tuscan accent could be said to help locate the film regionally within Italy, Il Mostro offers very few such definite markers.¹² Benigni’s film was shot almost entirely on set. Its few exterior sequences show not the famously beautiful Florentine periphery but a forgettable condominium complex in an equally undistinguished exurban setting.

Yet if the film’s setting is only distantly and doubtfully Tuscan, Benigni’s bumbling Loris, the mistaken killer, slyly recalls certain characteristics of Pacciani, the accused. Il Mostro suggests that the ungainly Loris could no more have successfully orchestrated the film’s serial crimes than Pacciani, the farmer from Mercatale (located some 25 kilometers south of Florence), could have acted as the sole perpetrator of the Monster’s murders. In this regard, the inept Loris corresponds to the oafish and seemingly near-illiterate Pacciani. The Monster’s series of complex crimes required tremendous organizational skill and patience and more than a little intellect. Consequently, those maintaining Pacciani’s innocence insisted on his inability to carry out such an elaborate scheme. At the conclusion of Il Mostro, when Loris unwittingly leads the police to the actual homicidal mastermind, Benigni makes it clear that it is luck, not skill—certainly not newfangled forensic techniques imported from the United States—that allows the forces of law and order to solve the case.

Although Benigni’s film clearly draws from the actual case against Pacciani, the relation of the actual three murder cases examined here to their corresponding literary and cinematic depictions is not a matter of equivalency. Before analyzing how these murders found expression in various cultural forms, each part of this study begins with a detailed history of the renowned murder in question. The chapters that follow these fact-based narratives examine the cultural issues that emerge from the murders, studying their representations in various cultural texts—chiefly contemporary Italian novels and films—but also in a wide array of related nonfictional narratives such as newspapers, court proceedings, self-help manuals, and memoirs. Attentive to the social and cultural contexts in which specific murders are embedded, Murder Made in Italy studies approximations—such as Benigni’s film, for example—that produce the cultural significance of murder in contemporary Italy.¹³

Murder, unlike some other crimes, offers a relatively simple story to tell. White-collar crimes, on the other hand, such as corruption and financial malfeasance, often demand an understanding of complex points of law that complicate their retelling.¹⁴ Despite similarities between murders in, say, Rome, Italy, and Rome, New York, murder is a crime that is tried and judged locally. Excluding relatively rare types of murder designated as war crimes and crimes against humanity, murders are tried in the jurisdictions in which they were committed. As the title of this introduction—Making a Killing—suggests, it is extremely important to emphasize the socially constructed nature of these murders, that is, the aspects of the various cases that make them uniquely Italian despite their apparent universalities.

Four key concepts serve as guides for the interpretation of the three murders Murder Made in Italy probes: moral panic; media spectacle; cronaca, or true crime; and the body.

MORAL PANIC

The concept of moral panic helps explain phenomena believed to erode a society’s social fabric. Moral panic is the result of the media’s fierce attention to the perceived threats to existing social practices, customs, and mores posed by specific social groups. A broad array of social concerns have produced various types of panics, ranging from juvenile crime, child abuse, and drug cultures to anorexia, xenophobia, and, more recently, social networking Internet sites and the possibilities they offer to a variety of social predators. The socially deviant behavior of a particular group or an individual believed to represent a group excites media commentary of all stripes. Such heightened attention enables forces of social order (e.g., politicians, law enforcement agents, legislators) to call for reform, often followed by legislation intended to prohibit further deviancy.¹⁵

Moral panic would be impossible to achieve without the fuel and vehicle for contagion that the media provides. The interlacing of event, journalistic reportage, and legal consequence shows the intersection of the law and the media, where one field comes into contact with and therefore shapes and conditions the other. Murder Made in Italy focuses on these conjoined and mutually informing fields, asking questions about the ways the law and the media represent each specific case and the violence that underlies it.

Each of the case studies I examine reveals different facets of moral panic. The Pacciani affair, the event narrative that anchors part 1, was predicated on unacceptable sexual and social practices, including Satanism.¹⁶ The slaying of couples in the Florentine hinterland also called up panic over the danger of stranger killings, as serial murder is also sometimes called. Strangers return as a theme in the second case I study, the Novi Ligure double homicide of 2001. Xenophobia fueled the moral panic that grew in response to this case. Bursting from her home to report the murders of her mother and younger brother at the hands of intruders, Erika De Nardo claimed that the Albanians did it.¹⁷ Her false denunciation radiated through the media like a seismic shock wave, receiving wide coverage. The killers of Susy Cassini and Gianluca De Nardo did indeed come to stand for a social group, but not for Albanian immigrants or even the problem of Italian immigration in general. Rather, Erika De Nardo and her boyfriend Mauro Omar Fàvaro came to symbolize disaffected and delinquent youth at risk of becoming perpetrators or victims—or both—of violence.

Erika De Nardo was not the only murderer, however, to invoke stranger danger, the rhyming caution so many parents in Anglophone countries drum into their children to put them on their guard against abduction and abuse. In January 2002, like De Nardo, Annamaria Franzoni, the convicted killer in the third case, claimed that an intruder had violated the sanctity of her home and murdered a family member. Rather than a xenophobic alarm raised to cover a daughter’s murder of her mother, however, the Cogne affair, according to the state’s accusation and conviction of Franzoni, featured a mother who killed her child and lucidly set out to cover up her actions. What the Novi Ligure and Cogne cases reveal is the threat to the family posed from within its structure, not from outside.¹⁸

The Amanda Knox case reprises various aspects of these different panics. Xenophobia erupted against Knox in the form of anti-Americanism and against the two black African men implicated, first Diya Patrick Lumumba and then Rudy Guede. The murdered body of Meredith Kercher, found in her bedroom with her throat slashed, recalled the terror of home invasion. Allegations surfaced that a sex game gone too far may have played a role in the murder, bringing with them commentary on the sexual aggression and prurience of one more demonized female criminal offender, the American college student Amanda Knox. In addition, the media landscape of the Knox case is located to the far side of the digital divide separating the investigations and trials of Pietro Pacciani, Erika De Nardo and Omar Fàvaro, and Annamaria Franzoni. The viral aspects of the circulation of information about the Knox case separate it from the murders made in Italy that serve as my chief focus. While all of the cases contain attributes of being a judicial media circus, as Daniel Soulez-Larivière describes it, they are worlds—and mediascapes—apart.¹⁹ Attending to the kind of media, the breadth of the media’s reach, and the cultural and historical context in which that media system is embedded is crucial.

MURDER, MEDIA, SPECTACLE

The murders I explore are not political murders like, for example, the assassination of either John F. or Robert Kennedy or Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States; Mohandas or Indira Gandhi in India; Yitzhak Rabin in Israel; Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan; Aldo Moro in Italy; or any of the others in the sad litany of slain political and religious leaders either associated with the state or profoundly enmeshed in social policy.²⁰ The Monster case is often woven into the tapestry of the misteri d’Italia, or Italy’s mysteries, as the series of unresolved crimes—largely but not exclusively unexplained murders that are considered as allegories of the state—are referred to. The double homicide in Novi Ligure and the murder of Samuele Lorenzi in Cogne, however, are not mysteries of this type.²¹ Yet the shift in focus to less overtly political murders does not strip them of political significance and ideological meaning.²² Rather, these three murders reveal ideological operations of different dimensions. Moreover, despite their smaller stature, each of the murders explored here achieved notoriety of spectacular proportions, with the media transforming each case into a judicial media circus.²³

Television was not, of course, the only medium making a killing or contributing to the spectacle of these murder cases. While print journalism and radio broadcasts still played a role in the dissemination of information, developments in electronic media, especially Internet access and cell-phone technology, all participated in the narration and re-narration of the murders and their investigations and trials. It is important to note that at the time of these trials, use of the Internet in Italy was increasing but by no means constituted a digital revolution for a variety of reasons, including its limited availability, Italy’s notoriously shaky telephone connectivity, and low awareness among the majority of Italians.²⁴ In the Novi Ligure case, for example, the use of cell phones among Italian youth became a hot-button topic of concern. As in the United States, young adults circumvented parental control via cell-phone communication and text messaging. The abbreviation SMS (short messaging system), for the application made available by both cell-phone and Internet technology, came to signify "Se mamma sapesse (should Mom suspect) and became a symptom of the aggressive and promiscuous behavior Erika De Nardo displayed only among her contemporaries.²⁵ Moreover, advances in Internet technology enabled the rapid circulation of information freed of the burden of fact checking. More significant than this, however, Internet discussions about the murders in Novi Ligure—for both those who actively posted to the discussions and those who passively read the comments—created a virtual community in which regional proximity was not required.²⁶ Technological advances in telecommunications also affected the third murder case. Jurist Enzo Tardino noted in his account of the Little Samuele case in Cogne, that for the first time in the judicial history of the nation (the conditions in which) the preliminary investigations … were followed live in their entirety by the media.²⁷ As mentioned, what distinguishes the context of the Knox case is the mediascape in which is it set. For example, cell phones and the information they provide (time and, often, location) were instrumental in the investigation of Kercher’s murder and played a key role in the state’s theory of the crime, that is, that Amanda Knox and her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, had staged a burglary to cover up their involvement in the murder. Circulation of information concerning the investigation and the trial had gone viral," providing a global audience with daily footage and commentary in the form of blogs and Internet chats.

CRONACA, OR TRUE CRIME: MURDER, REAL AND REPRESENTED

In the opening chapter, In Vespa (On a Vespa), of Caro diario, director Nanni Moretti’s three-part 1993 film, Moretti plays himself as the protagonist and samples offerings of Rome’s movie theaters during the slow summer months.²⁸ The selections are uninviting: monotonous Italian films, drab pornography, or imported slasher movies. Moretti first chooses a talky Italian film, a self-conscious parody of his own 1978 outing Ecce bombo, and then a slasher film. The camera follows the director into the theater as he watches Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, John McNaughton’s cult splatter flick from 1990. Appalled but also fascinated by its badness, Moretti devotes entire pages in his diary, the structuring device for the film’s three chapters, to reproducing the favorable reviews that led him to McNaughton’s movie. One of In Vespa’s most successful scenes stages Moretti’s fantasy visit to a film critic’s house. The critic lies whimpering in bed while Moretti sits beside him, reading aloud the critic’s incomprehensible reviews like some sort of diabolical bedtime story.

Structurally, the scene performs an important function. Just as Moretti collects hatchet-job film reviews, he also gathers clippings of other newsworthy events to include in his diary for reflection.²⁹ Taking a reverse tack to Benigni’s in Il Mostro, In Vespa transforms from fantasy to quasi-documentary, literally from one sequence to the next. From the fantasy of the critic’s bedroom, we cut to an altogether different scene. Positioned over the director’s shoulder, the camera shows Moretti’s hands in close-up as they sift through newspaper clippings.³⁰ Unlike the preceding sequence, the focus here is on the newspapers themselves, not the filmmaker. The clippings are, in fact, cronaca, or crime reports, from the newspapers Il manifesto, Il corriere della sera, and other Italian dailies that tell the story of the violent death of cultural critic, filmmaker, and author Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1975. By juxtaposing these two scenes of radically different styles, Moretti calls attention to the differences between them—the first a director’s revenge fantasy against a film critic who glorified the cinematic representation of serial killing, the second the factual retelling of a murder that still haunts Italy today—forcing their comparison by the obvious montage and the rapid cut that separates them and, in a sense, creating a hybrid montage of fantasy and reality.

Moretti’s diary entries mirror this hybridity. The diary is filled with all manner of entries, ranging from brief reflections and sketches to fantasies and ideas for films. His Vespa, which furnishes the title for this chapter of the film, underscores the diary’s hybrid form. Moretti’s scooter zips between these two modes of representation—between reality and fantasy—and the many tracking shots emphasize the organic union of Rome’s cinematic spaces, which contrasts with the staccato editing.³¹

Like Moretti’s and Benigni’s films, cronaca, too, is a hybrid genre combining different modes of representation. Contemporary Italian fictional representations of murder constitute a rich and growing subfield that has enjoyed much critical attention in the last decade.³² The various fictional and nonfictional narratives I study help map the social and cultural terrain in Italy in the last twenty-five years, a period that could be characterized generally as an atmosphere of lawlessness, of which the Tangentopoli corruption scandals of the 1990s offer but one (extended) scenario.³³

But first, it is important to understand that in Italy, crime is considered to be largely, if not solely, a regional problem that chiefly afflicts the southern reaches of the peninsula. While this has been true historically, as evidenced by the fact that the majority of murders in Italy are associated with crime organizations located south of Rome and in the islands of Sicily and Sardinia, the murders discussed here invert the notion that delinquency is rooted in the mezzogiorno, as Italy south of Rome is called.³⁴ A drawing by noted cartoonist Forattini published in La Repubblica in September 1990 offers an example. The drawing shows the most southern quadrant of Italy, Campania and south, inverted, with a danger sign reading "Attenzione! State entrando nella zona dove si ammazzano i bambini!" (Attention! You are now entering the zone where they kill children!). (See Figure 0.2.) The caption refers to the notorious killing in that time period of two children by the Camorra, the organized crime syndicate centered in the region of Campania and its capital, Naples.³⁵

What makes the cases I probe so fascinating is that they all take place north of Rome, indeed in Florence and points north. This work challenges notions of southern Italian criminality and, by extension, northern Italian public safety. In truth, one might post a sign outside the Valle D’Aosta, the location of the Cogne murder, or Piedmont, where the Novi Ligure slayings took place, to announce those areas as zone(s) of child-killers. However, Gianluca De Nardo and Samuele Lorenzi were not killed in the crossfire of warring southern Italian gangs. They were killed in the putatively safe havens of their northern homes, a sort of double violation of perceived notions of the geography of delinquency and the domestic sphere. Yet, while these murders help us reimagine Italian geography, they also invite us to imagine an Italy that is much less regionally disparate than previously considered.³⁶

FIGURE 0.2. Attenzione! State entrando nella zona dove si ammazzano i bambini! (Attention! You are now entering the zone where they kill children!) Drawing by Forattini (La Repubblica in September 1990).

Significantly, the contemporary Italian giallo, or detective story, also challenges received wisdom of geography, particularly regionality. This genre portrays widespread delinquency, especially in Italy’s central and northern regions.³⁷ The reconfiguration of Italian contours of criminality that takes place in contemporary fiction corresponds, in many ways, to the sort of virtual proximity to crime that increasingly rapid and widespread telecommunications is making possible. The Knox case makes this particularly apparent, especially, perhaps, by the role played by the Web pages Knox had designed for herself on the social networking sites MySpace and Facebook.

The notoriety of Italy’s various organized criminal organizations, from the Mafia to the Camorra, has principally accounted for the perception that the murder rate in the country is high.³⁸ Acknowledging the caveat that comparative data on crimes committed in distinct countries has not been historically entirely reliable, the crime rate in Italy in general and the murder rate specifically is low in comparison to other nation-states worldwide and specifically within Europe.³⁹ Comparative statistics gathered and presented by the British Home Office in 1997 put Italy’s murder rate at 1.61 in 100,000, virtually the equivalent of France’s (1.60), slightly higher than Germany’s (1.40) and the UK’s (1.49), but distinctly lower than Spain’s (2.60) and Finland’s (2.76).⁴⁰ Since World War II, the gap in murder rates in Italy and other European countries has narrowed. In the last decade, per-capita murder rates in Italy have fallen to a 500-year low.⁴¹ When murders carried out by the organized crime syndicates long associated with Italy are pieced out from other kinds of homicides, this rate declines still further.⁴²

Yet social and symbolic articulations such as Italian crime novels do not register the public perception of such safety and lawfulness in Italy. Indeed, an interest in event narratives may constitute eroded faith in the democratic rule of law. Such erosion could account for the ways the fictional narratives considered here sketch and traverse the parameters of the law, contesting any binary that insists on strict distinctions between what takes place inside legal institutions and what happens outside of them.

The shifting geography of delinquency compares to a general lack of definition concerning the shape and contours of crime narrative. In Italian literature, the category encompasses several forms, including the poliziesco (the police procedural), the giallo or noir (the detective/murder mystery), and cronaca.⁴³ The Italian publishing market has drawn no specific distinctions between these three literary genres. The critical reception of this genre has steadily increased over the last twenty-five years, as has its market share.⁴⁴

Cronaca, or true crime, actually operates on the principle of an ambiguity of form. True crime tends to blur genres, bringing together such incongruent forms as memoir, detective story, biography, and so forth.⁴⁵ In North American bookstores, true-crime books are often located next to sociology books, making true crime the nonfictional counterpart—and theory of—fictional narratives about crime and criminality, as Annalee Newitz notes.⁴⁶ Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is a classic in this genre. Published in 1966, it explores the 1959 murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. In formal terms, Capote’s work has been described as the non-fiction novel, collapsing the distinctions that typically separate these two genres.⁴⁷

Along these lines, I explore a mix of fictional narrative and non-fiction. Part 1, for example, examines publications written about the Monster murders from a variety of sources, including writings by jurists, journalists, and novelists.⁴⁸ Likewise, part 2 explores a nonfiction work about the De Nardo–Fàvaro killings written by a novelist as well as explorations of teenage privacy, one of the key issues in the case, in various literary genres. This opens wide a best-selling genre in Italy that includes parenting manuals and self-help books, to which, incidentally, the category of true crime might also belong. True-crime treatments of serial killers, for example, constitute, according to Mary Jean DeMarr, books (that) both horrify and reassure us and, significantly, teach us either how to live our lives to avoid encountering serial killers, as farfetched as that seems, or what to do if in fact we are ever in the clutches of a serial killer.⁴⁹ Part 3 also joins varied texts, bringing together memoirs, journalism, and exposé to reveal the many issues raised by the Franzoni case, including contemporary maternity, the spectacle of public mourning, the general safety of children in Italy, and the childhood witness of violence.⁵⁰

MURDER AND THE BODY: POSTMODERN POSTMORTEM

The body of the deceased has irrefutable material power in a murder case. Its power is no less potent in fictional representations of murder or, for that matter, in critical theory. As Mark Seltzer (who has worked more exhaustively on the subject of the representation of serial murder than any other critic) has observed, Murder is where bodies and history cross.⁵¹ Murder fundamentally records the effects of violence inflicted upon the body, and in the process it unmakes the body.⁵² In this way, murder disengages the body from its privileged place and status as a critical instrument. It is for this reason that the study of murder cannot be limited to the canonical sites of its investigation. It needs the kind of approach I have been describing, one that brings together a variety of critical discourses to explore less canonical narrative forms, asking how this union produces cultural meaning.

The body, the last of the four key principles that organize Murder Made in Italy, embraces multiple forms. Alive or dead, sexed and gendered, child or adult, classed and nationalized, maternal or filial, the body marks the convergence of subordination to so many social norms and their contestations. Murder undoes the body.⁵³ The body’s privacy is destroyed by murder, which demands redress from a state, which makes public the quest for justice.

Its life extinguished, the body becomes the most powerful marker of the abject, as proposed by Julia Kristeva and elaborated upon by Elizabeth Grosz, Barbara Creed, and others.⁵⁴ For Kristeva, the abject is an experience of limits and boundaries. Given its aim to distinguish one thing from another (pure from impure, inside from outside, and so forth), the abject indicates a process of identity formation, which Kristeva links to the social subject’s pre-linguistic connection to the maternal.⁵⁵ Signs of defilement associated with the abject are often indistinct: the means of containment of blood, viscera, excrement, and so forth often give way, and their collapse or erosion results in blurred boundaries. Attempts to determine fixed boundaries mirror the powerful fantasy of stable identity. Consequently, signs of the abject are themselves often signs of flux and flow that is out of place.⁵⁶ In its verbal form, the abject describes expulsion, the abjection of that which must be expelled (e.g., feces, the untouchable, the soul).

The murders and the issues they generate cluster around what is unacceptable and that which is abjected, or, expelled, from the social norm. Murder Made in Italy, taking a cue from the blurred boundaries of the abject, explores cultural forms—the slasher and horror film, pulp novels, Italian fiction of the so-called cannibals of the 1990s—similarly abjected from the canon of high cultural expression in Italy. Murder has probably always been considered unacceptable, one reason for its largely homogenous treatment by different cultures. Expulsion from society—exile—for the crime of murder has been a motif in cultural representations of the crime since, for example, the Oedipus. Surely since Freud’s exploration of Oedipus’s murder of his father Laius and its cultural echoes, murder has functioned symptomatically: it is the colophon, or the indicator, pointing to some other, deferred meaning. Thus killing the father, for example, has signified killing the state, the government, the existing social order, history.

No fathers are killed in this study, only children, siblings, mothers, and lovers. Nor do I focus on the grand narratives of the type of allegorical murders of state I described. The murders I explore, nevertheless, are powerful indicators of boundaries, transgression, and ideology, which is understood in a minor register.⁵⁷ The murder cases in Florence, Novi Ligure, and Cogne in the chapters that follow highlight anxieties about the erosion of putatively stable social values. Murder Made in Italy explores these unacceptable acts and the cultural forms they take.

MAP 1. Florence and surrounding areas, 1974–1985.

PART ONE

Serial Killing

INTRODUCTION

Extemplo Libyae magnas it Fama per urbes:

Fama malum quo velocius ullum;

Mobilitate viget, virisque acquirit eundo;

Parva metu primo; mox sese attollit in auras,

Ingrediturque solo, et caput inter nubila condit.

Monstrum, horrendum ingens;

cui quot sunt corpore plumae

Tot vigiles oculi subter, mirabile dictu,

Tot linguae, totidem ora sonant, tot subrigit aures.

—VIRGIL, THE AENEID IV, LL. 219–230 (MY ITALICS)

Straightway Rumor flies through Libya’s great cities,

Rumor, swiftest of all the evils in the world

She thrives on speed, stronger for every stride,

Slight with fear at first, soon soaring into the air

She treads the ground and hides her head in the clouds.

A monster, horrific, huge

and under every feather on her body—what a marvel—

an eye that never sleeps and as many tongues as eyes

and as many raucous mouths and ears pricked up for news.

and for every plume a sharp eye, for every opinion a biting tongue.

Everywhere its voices sound, to everything

its ears are open.) (MY ITALICS)

With his description of rumor in The Aeneid, the classical Roman poet Virgil offers an image that emphasizes rumor’s rapid spread and at the same time calls attention to the underpinning element of monstrosity. With its feathers like so many monstrous eyes, rumor is able to spread its wings and take flight. Long before the swiftness afforded by air travel—not to mention the advent of telecommunications—Virgil’s image insists on rumor’s speedy transport and transmission. Although it clearly travels, rumor appears to be omnipresent: since its voice is everywhere, it appears somehow already at its destination before it arrives.

Pietro Pacciani, the first man to stand trial for the serial murders attributed to the Monster, was convicted of murder in 1952, and the ways in which the news of that crime revisited his 1994 trial also recalls Virgil’s spread of rumor, this time aided by the speed and capacities for saturation that characterize contemporary media.¹ In this way, the nearly forty-year span between Pacciani’s 1952 conviction and his 1994 trial provides the opportunity to discuss the seismic shifts in the terrain occupied by the media in contemporary Italy.² Thus, I will draw attention to the proliferation of privately owned television channels and to the explosion of global telecommunications enabled by the development of the Internet.

The Monster narratives mark a period of transition in contemporary Italian society on several counts. This transition is visible both in the management and circulation of information and in its registration with government agencies; in criminological methodologies; in the powers of the police and the judiciary; and, finally, in an understanding of cultural identity shaped by regional location within Italy. For the ways this transition depends upon and exploits the looping of information and the radical entanglement between forms of eroticized violence and mass technologies of registration, identification, and repudiation, serial murder offers a point of departure for examining murder’s relation to media.³

Returning in time and tenor to Virgil’s rapid and monstrous rumor, we note its multiform, protean character. Like the collage of monstrous characteristics, the construction of the public discourse of serial killers in Italy—where they are commonly referred to as monsters—bears a similarly constructed aspect.⁴ Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, these monsters are stitched together from anthropology, folkways, literature, cinema, and (as the narrative of the case of the Monster illustrates) legal narrative. This suturing indicates other blurred distinctions between what is real and what is represented, between fiction and nonfiction, between legal and illegal, professional and amateur, and a host of other oppositions.

Like the construction of monstrosity, the murders attributed to the Monster and the trials that followed feature a contamination of form, hovering somewhere in the transom between rumor and reality. Hearkening back to a spread of rumor, Manlio Cancogni notes that like most Italians, what I know about the case of the Monster of Florence is based on hearsay.⁵ The shifts between these varying registers reveal slippages between seemingly clear divisions of the real and the represented.

Examining the slippage between genres enacts the type of genealogical project that French philosopher of history Michel Foucault explored. As Foucault described it, adopting a genealogical approach means operat(ing) on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times. ⁶ In this part of Murder Made in Italy, comprising chapters 1, 2, and 3, the parchments vary. The examination of the murders ascribed to the Monster, the subject of chapter 1, probes true-crime investigations of the murders, including television programs and broadcasts and accounts in print media. Yet nonfiction is not the only genre to illustrate the crimes and the sense of moral panic that unfolded from them: a ballad dating to the 1950s and performed by one of the region’s last cantastorie—the Tuscan version of the griot, the fabled storyteller of some African cultures—offers useful insight into the Monster’s crimes and Pietro Pacciani’s 1994 trial. Chapter 2 examines the representation of serial killers in contemporary Italian prose fiction, while chapter 3 focuses on serial killer, detection, and police incompetence in the films of the master of horror, Dario Argento.

The spectacle of these crimes underscores the dangers and pleasures of looking, the central matter that links the Monster narrative with its representation in assorted genres. Vision, sight, and looking constituted a chief concern in the investigation of the Monster’s murders, which relied in part on evidence supplied by some of the nocturnal voyeurs active in the countryside outside Florence. Sight and vision, for example, are emphasized in the announcement posted everywhere in and around Florence in the 1983–1984 biennial that cautioned young couples against seeking the privacy of wooded areas. The poster showed two eyes staring out with a caption that reads, "Occhio ragazzi: Non nascondetevi. C’è il Mostro." (Watch out, kids. Don’t seek cover. The Monster is out there.)⁷ Looking and seeing, moreover, enjoy elevated attention in the detective novel, where they serve as the capital metaphor for understanding, a point Andrea Pinketts makes particularly clear in his novels.⁸ Vision holds obvious importance for cinema, never more so than in the repeated display of the dangers of hurtable sight thematic in Argento’s films of the horror/slasher genre: as Argento’s cinema works to underscore the vulnerability of sight, paradoxically, because of their perceived extreme violence, his films are subject to considerable censorship.⁹ This juridical response intends, quite literally, to protect the commonweal’s vision by keeping such violent displays out of public view.

ONE

The Monster of Florence

Serial Murders and Investigation

IN THE ELEVEN-YEAR PERIOD from September 1974 to September 1985, seven couples were killed in Florence and the surrounding countryside. Once the seriality of the murders was established, panic and hysteria ensued. The victims were Stefania Pettini and Pasquale Gentilcore, murdered the night of September 14, 1974, in a rural lane in Borgo San Lorenzo; Carmela De Nuccio and Giovanni Foggi, whose bodies were discovered on June 7, 1981, near Scandicci; Susanna Cambi and Stefano Baldi, found on October 23 of the same year, in a park near Calenzano; Antonella Migliorini and Paolo Mainardi, murdered the night of June 19, 1982, on a country road near Montespertoli; Horst Meyer and Uwe Rüsch, whose bodies were discovered on September 10, 1983, in Galluzzo; Pia Rontini and Claudio Stefanacci, killed the night of July 29, 1984, in the woods near Vicchio di Mugello; and Nadine Mauriot and Jean-Michel Kraveichili, found murdered on September 9, 1985, in the woods near San Casciano.

The monster event in Florence generates two stories that, although by now inextricably connected by historical circumstance, must be considered as discrete narratives. The first story unfolds from the series of seven double homicides.¹ The second concerns the investigation of the crimes, in particular the investigation of Pietro Pacciani, an agricultural worker who had been in and out of prison for violent crimes and who became the state’s prime monstrous suspect. Although very few people doubt that the fourteen grisly homicides constitute a series, dispute erupted surrounding the killer’s identity.

The Monster’s crimes have excited a great deal of speculation about the identity of the perpetrator (or perpetrators) and possible motivations for the murders. The controversy that emerged concerned whether the crimes could likely have been done by one individual and whether more than one actor was involved. While many unsolved aspects of the murders exist, to say, as Douglas Preston does at the outset of the 2008 exposé The Monster of Florence (written with journalist Mario Spezi), that despite the longest manhunt in modern Italian history, the Monster of Florence has never been found and that in the year 2000 the case was still unsolved, the Monster presumably still on the loose is an exaggeration.²

If one believes in the theory of a lone killer, then it is true that no such individual has been brought to justice for the homicides. Pietro Pacciani, a farmer from Mercatale, was convicted for the murders in 1994, but his conviction was overturned two years later on the basis of poor evidence. At that point, the handling of the case descended into chaos. It was widely believed that Pacciani was the killer, and the public outcry was so great that the Supreme Court quickly scheduled a second trial. Meanwhile, on the day before Pacciani was released