Oral history, oral culture, and Italian Americans, edited by Luisa Del Giudice (original) (raw)

(for example, the president of the court had reacted to defendants' testimonies with ironic remarks that made spectators laugh) and the decision to build seating and distribute tickets, as though the defendants were to be stared at like wild beasts exhibited in a circus. Simpson observes that popular jokes and metaphors and widespread poetic and artistic interpretation of the affair illustrated the ways in which the event 'penetrated the imagination of Italians'. The story attracted cultural celebrities of the time like Giosue Carducci and Cesare Lombroso; Francesco Netti's In Corte d'Assise, an 'anodyne classical scene' still on display at the Pinacoteca Provinciale in Bari, survives as a visual legacy of the trial. Following these developments, Simpson outlines the 'sociological lineaments' and 'psychosocial underpinnings' of the crime, framing an interpretative scheme in which every character played a role. The victim represented the nation and, in his virtues of rectitude and integrity, stood for progress and the young state. The plotting couple symbolised the South and, in particular, Cardinali, the acrobat snared by the captain's wife to kill her husband, stood for 'subterfuge, primitivism, and bestiality' (p. 20). The murder was more than an ordinary act carried out for love or money. It was 'an assault on the virtues that sustained the state, identified in turn with modern civilization itself' (p. 184). In its symbolic reach the Fadda-Saraceni story mirrored relations between civilians and the army in the South, prejudiced by an established tradition of mutual distrust. Throughout the book, Simpson describes how journalists exploited the Fadda affair. In particular, two new newspapers, the Corriere della Sera, founded in 1876 in Milan, and Il Messaggero, established in 1878 in Rome, increased their circulation on the back of the trial. In November 1879, an editorial note in the Corriere della Sera responded to a subscriber from Modena who had asked 'Wouldn't it be possible to publish an issue virgin of shame?' by saying that, were it to follow the suggestion, 'We would fail in the first duty of journalism, which is to display the world just as it is'. Simpson concedes that crime and judicial reporting played a significant role in the diffusion of literacy and in the spread of the habit of reading after unification, but he also points out that often the journalistic treatment of new stories was characterised by a process of 'novelisation': details that no one could verify were introduced by correspondents, who grew more and more accustomed to drawing on the modes of crime fiction. The Fadda case, the author notes, soon became 'a spectacle of distortion', containing 'in prototypical form all the nightmarish elements that have since become canonical to the media circus phenomenon' (p. 187).