Murder and Media in the New Rome: The Fadda Affair

This book explores a sensational crime and trial that took place in Rome in the late 1870s, when the bloody killing of a war hero triggered a national spectacle. A young southern wife’s murder of her impotent soldier husband exploded into the first great “media circus” in the new nation of Italy. The trial of the widow and her acrobat lover shocked the young nation not only with its gruesome details, but also because masses of women flocked to the court, took sides and heatedly reacted to testimony, as a new generation of newspapers exploited the scandal to enchant an untapped readership. Largely ignored by historians, the Fadda Affair, as it was called, crucially shaped the young nation’s self-image, but it still resists reduction to historiographical formula, even as its raucous messiness presages the postmodern centrality of performance and the displacement of substance by sensation.