On a Sunday morning in October 1878, in Rome, a certain Giovanni Fadda was fatally stabbed; however, he managed to come out into the street and point to someone making off, who was quickly apprehended by two off-duty civic guards. In custody, the supposed assassin Pietro Cardinali, who had been working as a circus acrobat, protested his innocence and gave the investigators a rather confused account of how he had met Fadda. Subsequently, the background to the story emerged, making sense of the criminal deed. Giovanni Fadda, the victim, was an army officer who in 1871, in Naples, had married Raffaella Saraceni, a young woman from a middle-class family of Cassano allo Ionio (Calabria). Two particular factors had made their union difficult: Giovanni's possible impotence, resulting from a combat wound, and Raffaella's intense relationship with her mother and her family of origin. These issues determined that Giovanni – who was often on the move, posted to Sicily, to Chieti, and finally to Rome – and Raffaella only lived together for very short periods during their marriage. Then in June 1878, during one of their spells apart, the circus that Pietro worked in stopped in Sibari, near Cassano allo Ionio. And there the fatal triangle took shape.

This episode provides the starting point for Mark Seymour's praiseworthy exploration of the emotional sphere – both public and private – that characterised Italian society in the period immediately after Italy's unification. Among the methodological reference points that are duly discussed, two particularly stand out. On the one hand, Seymour follows the analytical model offered by the exponents of microhistory (Carlo Ginzburg and Edoardo Grendi, for example), with its invitation to study ‘the exceptional normal’: an unusual event, with all its particular features, can reveal the structures that underlie more general ways of thinking, power relationships, and social or gender relations. On the other, he engages with the historiography that in the last 20 years or so has encouraged explorations of the emotional dimension of past societies, taking its cue from the important works by Barbara Rosenwein and William Reddy; moreover, this book is published in a series specifically dedicated to ‘Emotions in History’.

Seymour's dual methodological approach is facilitated by the wealth of documentation collected around the ‘Fadda case’. The circumstances of the murder were pieced together by a thorough enquiry, followed by a trial, held in Rome in the autumn of 1879; together, these generated a rich repository of material, consisting of statements made during the interrogations and hearings, documents seized (including personal correspondence), and vivid in-depth press coverage. On the basis of this documentation, Seymour identifies five ‘emotional arenas’, meaning five public and private spaces characterised by relationships in which the interaction and communication could be intensely emotional: the private space of a marriage, that of Giovanni and Raffaella; the space of circus performance, with the strong emotions generated, including erotic ones (the male and female artistes performing acrobatic numbers wore close-fitting leotards that elicited reactions of desire from both the male and female public, involving fantasy or, sometimes, action); the space of illicit affairs, documented by the letters that admirers sent to Pietro Cardinali; the space of mortality, in reference to the new way in which both public death (especially that of King Victor Emmanuel II, on 9 January 1878) and private death (that of Giovanni Fadda, although this quickly became a public event) were experienced in a country in which the Catholic Church still exerted a profound influence, but no longer had exclusive control of the moment of passing; and, finally, the space of judicial proceedings, in the situation in which a case became a real ‘show trial’, closely followed by the public and the press.

The fields of tension examined here by Seymour are certainly manifold. In some cases the emotionality on show is related to specific characters (Giovanni, Pietro, Raffaella, and their fellow protagonists), each having their own story and their own emotional sensibility. Very often, however, the working through of emotions appears evident in the construction of public events: for example, in the manner in which the funeral of Victor Emmanuel II was organised; in the way the press shaped its story-telling around an episode of ‘criminal love’; and in the way the trial itself became a public performance, both within Rome's Court of Assizes itself and in its reflection in newspaper articles, often accompanied by evocative illustrations, a good number of which Seymour deftly employs.

This research has some very important implications. Traditional understandings about codes of behaviour (as well as emotional expression), constructed, for example, around the value of honour, still appear to have exerted a profound influence on the structuring of the reactions of individuals in this episode, and, especially, on the ways that the media story was constructed around the case. By contrast, the reactions of public figures such as Giosuè Carducci and Giovanni Battista Varè, the Justice Minister, were intended to promote more self-controlled collective behaviour (by women, government officials, and the press), indicating that at least one section within the Italian elites – to borrow from Norbert Elias – wanted to push forward the ‘civilising process’ by encouraging greater self-control as the mark of new styles of thinking and behaving in Italy's collective culture. The field of tension identified here is important, and surely needs to be explored further if we are to undertake a comprehensive mapping of the emotional world of late nineteenth-century Italy. What is clear, however, is that this crucial piece of research by Mark Seymour will be an indispensable reading.

You may be wondering how the story ended. Was Pietro guilty? Had Raffaella been his lover? And what happened to them? Well, this time, and out of respect for Seymour's quality of writing, I can only advise you to read the book, and you will find out.