Introduction: Franca Viola’s story as a mafia story

Franca Viola’s ‘no’ to the offer of a matrimonio riparatore (reparatory marriage) from Filippo Melodia, the mafioso who kidnapped and raped her in Alcamo, in the province of Trapani, in 1965, is an iconic moment of Italian history, which had a paradigm-shifting impact not only on the justice system of the country but also on its cultural self-awareness. By questioning honour-based norms often associated with southern Italian society but in fact widespread across Italy in regulating women’s sexuality, Viola’s choice to seek justice through the legal system became a milestone of the Italian movement for women’s rights, giving impetus to the debate around article 544 of the penal code that exonerated perpetrators of rape from prosecution in cases of subsequent marriage to their victims.Footnote ¹

It is not surprising, then, that Viola’s ‘case’ and Viola herself acquired mythical status from the outset, with the media reporting in detail from the trial of her rapist and kidnappers. Viola’s looks, her clothes and her public countenance became the objects of media fascination and dozens of opinion pieces were written asking how such a young Sicilian woman had been able to show such courage. The media attention continued beyond the trial, which ended with a guilty verdict and prison sentences for Melodia and his accomplices. Despite her desire for privacy, Viola became, in Diletta Pavesi’s words, ‘the meeting point of many media discourses’, a ‘symbol of the desired Sicilian emancipation’, and a ‘fundamental point of reference for the budding feminist movement’ (Reference Pavesi, Giori and Subini2022, 74).Footnote ² Viola’s choice to denounce Melodia was not an act of gendered rebellion, at least in her intentions. However, it entailed a defiance of omertà, the code of silence demanded by mafia culture. Indeed, it was the end point of a resistance put up by Viola and her family against Melodia’s attempt, through a series of mafia-related actions, to coerce them into a marriage which he sought for ends other than love: namely, as part of his project to build a reputation for himself in order to become a mafia boss.

Franca Viola did not belong to a mafia family and, therefore, does not feature in the scholarship on women and the mafia. However, her case unfolded in a mafia environment with mafia modalities. She was born in Alcamo on 9 January 1948, the daughter of Vita Ferra and humble mezzadro (sharecropper) Bernardo Viola. She was abducted from her home in 1965 by a group of 11 armed men led by her former fiancé Filippo Melodia, the nephew of local mafia boss Vincenzo Rimi (1902–75). The 17-year-old was held hostage, starved and sexually abused for eight days. Melodia was counting on articles 544 and 530 of the Italian penal code, which extinguished the crime of sexual violence with the matrimonio riparatore. He was clearly hoping to exploit the ‘ambiguity between love, coercion and violence that lay at the heart of the “fuitina”’ (Cullen Reference Cullen2016, 99) ‒ the strategy of consensual elopement adopted by couples to force families to consent to a love marriage that they opposed. This was precisely the line of defence adopted by Melodia’s lawyers at the trial. Indeed, everybody’s expectation was that marriage would be demanded by Viola’s family (Cullen Reference Cullen2016, 99). However, she rejected Melodia’s marriage offer.

Prior to the abduction, Melodia had resorted to violent means to retaliate against the Viola family for breaking the engagement and rejecting a second marriage proposal: he had burnt down their farmhouse, destroyed their vineyard and crops, and sent death threats to Viola’s father and to her current fiancé’s father (see Di Bella Reference Di Bella1986, 88). Despite these actions typical of a vendetta as described by Giuseppe Pitré in the nineteenth century (Reference Pitré1889, 305), Viola persisted in rejecting Melodia’s marriage offer and, with the support of her parents, pressed charges against him. The nine-day trial that followed in December 1966 received the attention of the local, national and international press. Melodia was found guilty of kidnapping and rape with the aim solely of marriage but not of insulting Bernardo Viola. Thus, as reported in Corriere della Sera on 18 December 1966, the more serious charge of caratteristica impresa mafiosa, mafia-related activity, was dropped (quoted in Di Bella Reference Di Bella1986, 99). Nevertheless, Melodia was sentenced to 11 years in prison. His accomplices also received prison sentences.

Other facets of Viola’s case bring it within mafia territory. Within the debate concerning whether organised crime can be overcome solely through the state institutions of justice and repression, scholars unanimously believe that the involvement of civil society is necessary to defeat it and to implement democracy (see Falcone with Padovani 1991; Cottino Reference Cottino1999; Parini Reference Parini, Allum and Siebert2003; Siebert Reference Siebert and Serenata2014). Taking democracy to be ‘a series of procedures aimed at guaranteeing the widest participation of citizens in public affairs’ (Bobbio 1987, quoted in Parini Reference Parini, Allum and Siebert2003, 130), it becomes clear that organised crime challenges democracy in many ways, most significantly because it deprives citizens of the right to choose and to dissent (Siebert Reference Siebert and Serenata2014, 23). The same scholars envisage two kinds of participation of civil society in the fight against organised crime: resistance to it and co-operation with state institutions. Both require breaking two fundamental laws that regulate mafia organisations: omertà and private justice. Citizens must resort instead to the democratic system: they have to speak up and turn to the police and legality. This is what Viola did, even though her actions were not prompted by political beliefs.

Viola’s ‘no’ was framed by the press as an act of resistance reflecting an emerging modern and rational Sicilian society versus a traditional and irrational one (Di Bella Reference Di Bella1986; Cullen Reference Cullen2016; Vitale Reference Vitale2020). Niamh Cullen (Reference Cullen2016, 109–110) reports that the newspapers depicted Melodia as representing ‘the brash, violent and distasteful face both of a certain type of masculinity and of the link between local Sicilian society and the criminality of the mafia’, and fitted him into preconceived, racist ideas of Sicily as barbaric and retrograde. Maria Pia Di Bella (Reference Di Bella1986, 89) focuses on the mafia reverberations of the case and reflects on the wider cultural implications of the behaviour of all the males involved. Counter to the media’s positive portrayal of Bernardo Viola, she proposes that he had acted according to the same mafia code of honour as Melodia. She argues that if Melodia had felt slighted by a poor ignorant peasant, Bernardo Viola had rejected the matrimonio riparatore because he had felt humiliated by Melodia’s actions (Di Bella Reference Di Bella1986, 98–100). Therefore, both Di Bella and Cullen show the interconnectedness of social conventions and criminal codes, gender violence and mafia violence, and ultimately of patriarchal thought and mafia mentality.

The kidnapping of Franca Viola was a lot more than an abduction with the aim of marriage of the kind that was common at the time not only in Calabria and Sicily but also in other parts of Italy (Cullen Reference Cullen2016, 99–100). Melodia not only used violence to control a woman but also used Viola as a means to enhance his prestige among the villagers in view of becoming a mafia boss. Indeed, when Melodia came out of prison in 1976, he was sent to Modena on mandatory residence on account of his mafia connections. He was shot dead there with a lupara (sawn-off shotgun) in 1978, in what appeared to be a mafia-style execution (Nardacchione Reference Nardacchione2021).

John Foot (Reference Foot2018, xiii) considers Viola to be one of those ordinary Italians who changed Italy after 1945. Even though she did not go on to campaign for any cause, her ‘no’ is recognised as having led to the abolition of articles 544 and 587 of the penal code, respectively on matrimonio riparatore and delitto d’onore (honour crime). Furthermore, contrary to the social expectations of the time and the mentality that would consider her a donna disonorata (dishonoured woman) whom no man would want to marry, in 1968 she married a childhood friend.

Viola’s impactful case became the basis of a number of cultural adaptations immediately after the trial and in more recent times. In particular, her refusal to speak about her ordeal in public during the trial and her reticence to discuss her life afterwards offered writers and film directors the opportunity to develop the case according to their aesthetic preferences and/or socio-political aims, directly reflecting on a variety of themes or generating reflection on them among readers and spectators: Sicilian society in the 1960s, the intersection between mafia and social mores, women’s oppression, and the possibility of resisting oppression by challenging both patriarchy and mafia culture.

The first works appeared shortly after the events and were authored by men: Heinz Kruschel’s novel Die Rebellion der Franca Viola (Franca Viola’s Rebellion), published in Reference Engelke1969 under the pseudonym of Heinz Engelke and reissued in digital format in 2020, and Damiano Damiani’s Reference Damiani1970 film La moglie più bella (The Most Beautiful Wife). Silence followed until the publication of Beatrice Monroy’s Niente ci fu (Nothing Happened) in Reference Monroy2012. Monroy’s work, together with the title of Grande Ufficiale dell’Ordine al merito della Repubblica italiana bestowed upon Viola on 8 March 2014 by the president of the Italian Republic, generated a wave of interest in her case, with the appearance of a number of academic publications and interviews, prose works, plays and films. The prose works include Daniela Palumbo’s Reference Palumbo2017b short story for young readers ‘Franca Viola. Tu metti una mano, io ne metto cento’ (Franca Viola. You Put One Hand, I’ll Put a Hundred); Katja Centomo’s Reference Centomo2018 book for children of nine years of age upwards Franca Viola ‒ La ragazza che disse no (Franca Viola ‒ The Girl Who Said No); Natalie Galli’s Reference Galli2019 travel book, The Girl Who Said No: A Search in Sicily, built around the author’s parallel search for her Sicilian heritage and for Viola for an American and American-Italian readership; and Viola Ardone’s Reference Ardone2021 novel Oliva Denaro (The Unbreakable Heart of Oliva Denaro: A Novel, Reference Ardone2023a). Filmic adaptations include Marta Savina’s Reference Savina2017 short film Viola, Franca and, in the wake of the latter’s international success, the Reference Savina2022 feature-length film Primadonna (The Girl from Tomorrow) by the same director. All titles stress Viola’s resistance and rebellion, drawing attention to the exceptionality and exemplarity of her story. The more recent works come in the wake of the surge in violence against women in Italy and globally and the rise of a number of movements aimed at countering it, making the task of investigating the links between patriarchy and the violence of criminal organisations all the more important. Galli’s, Monroy’s and Centomo’s works display respectively a female narrator protagonist, a female collective voice, and three young female protagonists, all searching for Viola. Savina’s film is also rigorously focalised through the perspective of its female protagonist. While the first two adaptations were authored by men, those that have followed since 2012 have been the work of women, undoubtedly a consequence of the acquisition of voice by Italian women in all areas, including culture, during 50 years of feminist self-awareness, theorisations and political fights.

This article discusses prose and film adaptations of Viola’s case, with the aim of exploring its lasting impact on Italian society and culture, while reflecting on the different perspectives each of these works raise regarding the intersection between the mafia and women’s oppression and the tools available to resist both. Our choice of limiting our analysis to written narratives and films reflects our academic specialisms, which do not include theatre.Footnote ³ We have also excluded Engelke/Kruschel’s prose work, owing to our limited knowledge of German. The prose and film adaptations are discussed in two separate sections to reflect and respect their genre-specific qualities. The first analytical section examines the historical, political and didactic intentions behind the works by Monroy, Galli, Palumbo, Centomo and Ardone. We pay attention to the narrative strategies they adopt to negotiate fact and fiction, document and imagination, in order to accomplish these intentions – noting, however, that we are not concerned with ascertaining whether these works are accurate accounts of Viola’s story, but rather with the direct and indirect claims they make to adhere to documentary evidence. The second analytical section adopts a historical perspective to explore how the case has been culturally elaborated in the span of 50 years that separates Damiani’s (Reference Damiani1970) and Savina’s (Reference Savina2022) feature films. The conclusion brings together prose and film adaptations, highlighting both the differences in emphasis across time and contexts and the aim shared by the various authors to portray a woman’s exemplary challenge to organised crime and patriarchal violence. It also compares Franca Viola’s case with the phenomenon of mafia women turned state witnesses. Recent research on mafia women has dismantled the stereotypical male narratives ‒ propagated by civil society and law enforcement agencies ‒ of mafia women as invisible and silent, entirely subordinate to men and devoted to the family, and unaware of their families’ illegal activities. It has instead disclosed their varying levels of involvement and responsibility in these activities, their key roles in ensuring the survival of the mafias, their leadership and innovational capabilities, and their criminal agency. Nevertheless, criminal organisations reflect the gender inequalities of local communities and wider Italian society, and, like all Italian women, mafia women have to work hard within their organisations to gain rights and obtain access to career opportunities and places of power. And while they are capable of ordering and conducting violent acts and even killings, they can themselves be subjected to the violence and abuse of their husbands or other relatives.Footnote ⁴ In our conclusion, we are concerned with mafia women who, like Franca Viola, have spoken up and turned to justice: together they have put a chink in the masculine armour of the mafia and of Italian society, advancing women’s rights and furthering democracy.

Prose works between fact and fiction, gender and mafia: a historical and didactic project

Most of the prose works inspired by Franca Viola appear to be aimed at reviving the memory of her case and teaching new generations an important but unknown chapter of Italian history and its lasting impact on contemporary society. As works of imagination based on real facts, they place themselves at various points on the scale between documentary and fiction. They also differ vis-à-vis the space and weight they assign to the mafia versus gender, a characteristic that is also relevant to the films.

Monroy’s and Galli’s texts employ several documentary elements, though in different ways and with different aims based on their intended audiences. Galli embeds the search for Viola within the travelogue of an American-Italian woman named Natalie Galli, who, spurred by the memory of Viola’s story, which she had read in the American press as a teenager, goes to Sicily 22 years later in search of an understanding of its history and culture and of Sicilian women’s condition. She visits relatives and places, including libraries, looking for information on Viola’s trial and life. A librarian puts her in touch with Viola herself, who, unexpectedly, grants her a telephone interview. The interview is reported in English together with the translation of newspaper articles she obtains. The book closes with an appendix of documentary materials on Melodia’s appeal in 1967, Viola’s marriage in 1968, and the birth of her son in 1970.Footnote ⁵ The narrative starts with the encounter of the narrator as a teenager and her family with an important mafia boss who saves her younger sister from the indignation of a group of women in Agrigento who object to her dress. The mafia then emerges regularly in her conversations with her family as a dire aspect of local life about which they must keep silent, or at best that must only be whispered about. Reporting a conversation concerning the drug war between mafia factions, the narrator emphasises breath and voice:

The reticence of the locals to speak about the mafia makes them reluctant even to mention the words that describe it: ‘“We are Sicilians, you see, and Sicilians respect silence, because we must.” … “Our lives depend on silence. Nobody will want to stir up the past, do you see.” This was not a question’ (Galli Reference Galli2019, 56–57). The word omertà is mentioned only three times in a 380-page book:

There are initially only indirect references to the connection between the mafia and Viola’s story, as evidenced in this memory of the threats suffered by Viola’s family by a family friend: ‘The family was threatened over and over. They didn’t feel safe leaving their house. Their crops in the field were trampled and their barn was set on fire. The pressure to make Franca marry him did not stop all year’ (Galli Reference Galli2019, 121). These references become ‘louder’ as Natalie obtains newspaper articles about the trial and quotes lengthy sections from them: ‘A mafia vendetta is at the center of this trial’ (Galli Reference Galli2019, 162, italics in the original).

On the other hand, Monroy’s Niente ci fu is very explicit on, and critical of, the aspects that remain ‘whispered’ in Galli. It is a complex text that straddles different genres, periods and styles. Narrative sections reconstructing imaginatively Viola’s ordeal are juxtaposed with factual sections detailing Italian legislation and events involving real mafia criminals and politicians. Sections on kidnapping and rape in myths and legends, such as those of Kore and Demeter and the Sabine women, are interleaved with sections on contemporary real women and men from Sicily and other countries, such as Kosovo, who were victims of the code of honour and omertà and of sexual violence. Monroy adopts an unusual narrative strategy. Viola’s story is recounted neither in the first person by herself nor in the third person by an omniscient narrator or another character. We have instead what appears to be a collective voice of Sicilian women who understand Viola’s ordeal, a noi (us) who, echoing the chorus of Greek tragedy, reaches out to her with tu (you) and addresses her as Franca, indicating a desire for and a claim to intimacy, and speaking about her while talking to her, in an attempt to solve the paradox of giving a voice to somebody who had no voice:

Viola’s ordeal is later imagined and recounted in the present tense through her thoughts and feelings as if happening live in front of our eyes. Tu and noi are contrasted with loro (them), the men who abuse women. The book’s leitmotif is silence, variedly intended as the law of omertà which forces people to pretend not to see the abuse and to accept the power of the mafia, the subjugation of Sicily by Italy, the oppression and silencing of women by fathers and brothers, the mafia and the institutions, and by a patriarchal system that goes back into legend and myth. The title Niente ci fu refers to the practice of pretending, encouraged by mothers, that nothing has happened when abuse and rape have occurred. This noi‒tu structure makes Viola part of a female community that understands perfectly her plight and sentiments. Perhaps in Monroy’s intentions, it was also meant to lend authority to her imaginative reconstruction of Viola’s story, so that it could be accepted as reliable by her readers.

In the first interview Viola gave years after the trial, she stated that Monroy’s book did not reflect the reality of her story, especially mispresenting her father (De Gregorio and Viola Reference De Gregorio and Viola2015). The book indeed departs from later representations, making Viola’s ‘no’ her father’s decision. Monroy repeatedly stresses that her character, Franca, and the other abused women featured in her book were never asked for their opinion or what they wanted. She thus deprives Viola of agency, when in her rare interviews Viola has always made the point that it was her decision not to marry Melodia. She has also consistently defended her choice of remaining silent. The other books which we are about to examine unanimously represent Viola as resolutely rejecting the idea of marrying Melodia before and after the kidnapping, her father as unconditionally supporting her against the advice of the priest and the villagers, and the family working together, amid doubts and fears, to take Melodia to court.

Imaginative recreation of real events is the hallmark of Palumbo’s Noi, ragazze senza paura (We, Fearless Young Women), a collection of eight fictionalised short stories (racconti romanzati) (Palumbo Reference Palumbo2017a, 7) about eight Italian brave young women who have made the world a fairer one for contemporary young people to grow up in. The documentary basis of the stories is reinforced by drawings of the faces of the real women and an initial factual account of who they were, what they did, and the significance and impact of their actions. The idea sustaining the book, as stated in the introduction, is that these life stories can become a ‘seed that breeds our conscience’ and an example for others to break the yoke of violence and oppression (Palumbo Reference Palumbo2017a, 9), making the didactic project explicit from the start. ‘Franca Viola. Tu metti una mano, io ne metto cento’ focuses on the abduction, with a step back in time detailing the events that preceded it and why Viola’s initial attraction to Melodia turned into rejection, and a step forward to her release and reunion with her family. Except for Melodia’s violent reaction to Viola’s disgust for his forceful kidnapping, Palumbo does not recreate the gruelling time she spent in his hands, perhaps to preserve her privacy and to make the story suitable for a young readership. However, the sexual abuse is clearly indicated in the factual section ‘Chi è Franca Viola’ (Who Is Franca Viola), together with the immediate and long-term outcomes of her rejection of marriage: the prison sentence for Melodia and his henchmen and the future changes in legislation (Palumbo Reference Palumbo2017b, 96–98). The narrative, based on documents and Viola’s own recent interviews, underlines the links between mafia culture and the physical, sexual and emotional domination of women. The temporal shifts detail the young woman’s gradual understanding of how the attraction Melodia exerted, originating in the lure of power and financial security, deprived her of dignity and freedom (Palumbo Reference Palumbo2017b, 90–91). The last two pages reproduce a conversation between father and daughter culled from Viola’s already mentioned Reference De Gregorio and Viola2015 interview with De Gregorio. She explains why she does not wish to marry Melodia:

The father’s reply, which gave the title to Palumbo’s story, is a promise that he will do anything to support her decision: ‘All right. You put one hand, I’ll put a hundred’ (Palumbo Reference Palumbo2017b, 95). The protagonist’s reasons for not wanting to marry her rapist are an outright rejection of the moral and social codes that underpin both mafia and patriarchal systems in relation to gender: female subjugation by males, women as the possession of fathers, brothers and husbands, women as objects of exchange between men, and sexual double standards are some of these codes.

The remaining two books place themselves at the fictional end of the scale. Centomo’s Franca Viola ‒ La ragazza che disse no cleverly inserts a documentary/factual dimension into a fictional frame. Ardone’s Oliva Denaro veers entirely towards the fictional: Franca Viola is never mentioned, but the author ingeniously signals her inspiration by embedding the historical character into the novel through her own first name, Viola, and by giving her eponymous protagonist a name that is an anagram of her own. Thus, Ardone also points to the idea that sustains her novel throughout: Oliva Denaro’s/Franca Viola’s story concerns her and all women, who must draw inspiration from it and act collectively to effect change (see Donadey Reference Donadey2023). Both novels answer the need voiced by Palumbo to create a social conscience through stories set within episodes of recent Italian history.

Published in the Einaudi Ragazzi series ‘Eroi’, Centomo’s plot features teenage protagonists to make it attractive to a young readership. Three 16-year-old school friends from northern Italy are vacationing in Sicily in a location close to Alcamo, Viola’s birthplace. One of them has to write a school essay on a ‘hero’ of her choice. Costanza, who has Sicilian parents, suggests Viola’s case as a topic. This takes them on an internet search for information which they then share to reconstruct Viola’s story. The interaction between the three protagonists and their different personalities, interests, experiences and levels of maturity make them sounding boards for one another’s reflections on changes in young people’s behaviour and attitudes over the 50 years since Viola’s case. The story of Franca Viola and Filippo Melodia takes shape alongside the story of the break-up of one of them with her boyfriend, providing useful points of comparison between the boyfriend’s threats of posting an unflattering photo of the young woman on social media and Melodia’s actions against Viola and her family, thus highlighting the persistence of misogynistic mindsets.

Costanza’s interest in jurisprudence is a device to open up a discussion on article 544: the beginnings of matrimonio riparatore as a strategy of consensual elopement; how a law designed to protect women from unscrupulous men was instead used to coerce women into marriage through sexual violence; and how Viola’s ‘no’ led to its abolition. This leads to comparisons between the 1960s and the present on issues of gender relations, consent and respect for women. Thus, the book delivers a number of instructional messages to young people: the link between gender violence and mafia culture, the persistence of misogynistic attitudes in today’s society, and the need to challenge these attitudes.

Ardone’s feminist project in Oliva Denaro is clear from the opening paragraph:

Viola had a younger brother. Oliva has a twin brother. This enables Oliva, who is the narrator, to reflect on sex and gender differences from a young age (see also Ardone Reference Ardone2023a, 162). Thus, the idea that gender is the result of socialisation is made accessible linguistically and conceptually to a young readership (providing an easy-to-grasp illustration of Simone de Beauvoir’s foundational feminist notion that ‘One is not born a woman, one becomes one’). Oliva understands lucidly that skills and roles are not the result of biological sex, when, for example, she says that she is good at school while her brother is not or that she enjoys helping her father in tasks that society expects to be performed by her brother. Yet, she also makes it clear that men have a physical advantage that allows them to do much more than women, including using physical violence to subjugate them.

The word ‘mafia’ is absent from Ardone’s novel, but the references to a society regulated by violence and mafia values are loud and clear. Oliva’s mother expects her husband to solve her daughters’ situations with the lupara, but he rejects that kind of justice: ‘“Justice?” Father says … “Justice is another matter”’ (Ardone Reference Ardone2023a, 199). That Oliva’s world is ruled by this type of justice is intimated from the beginning when her best friend Liliana, a keen photographer, shows her photographs of dead people lying in the street. The episode in the pastry shop belonging to Oliva’s rapist Pino Paternò resonates with mafia culture: when Oliva and her father refuse Paternò’s gift of a cassata, he threatens them first to accept the gift gratefully and then to expect consequences for rejecting it. The men sitting in the piazza who witness the scene criticise the father for buying cakes from the man who has ruined his daughter’s honour, instead of killing him (Ardone Reference Ardone2023a, 104–111). Yet, the villagers had remained silent when Paternò attacked Oliva’s family’s property. Honour and revenge are the guiding values of that society, which depend on the gaze of others (Ardone Reference Ardone2023a, 215).

The head of police advises Oliva against rejecting marriage, explaining that power and justice are ‘for people with money’ and that, even though article 544 was ostensibly made to protect women, the law will be on the man’s side (Ardone Reference Ardone2023a, 212–214). Paternò’s family are loan sharks with money and contacts. He boasts that he will resort to any means to avoid a sentence, thus pointing to institutional corruption. When he comes out of prison, only one year after his sentence (a notable difference from the real case), Paternò has acquired value and authority in the villagers’ eyes (Ardone Reference Ardone2023a, 299).

Ardone’s plot goes beyond the trial, stopping in 1981 with the abolition of articles 544 and 587. Oliva qualifies as a teacher with the support of other women, gets a teaching post in Naples, returns to her village to teach in her primary school, and marries her childhood friend, while her friend Liliana pursues a political career and campaigns successfully to change the penal code.Footnote ⁷ The last part of the book is set on the day after the Italian parliament voted to abolish matrimonio riparatore and delitto d’onore. Oliva’s family reunite at her home in the village and Oliva goes to buy a cassata from Paternò’s shop. When he asks her disdainfully what she has achieved by rejecting his cassata and his offer of marriage many years earlier, she answers: ‘I’ve come to buy with money I have earned from my job what many years ago you wanted to force on me. What have I gotten out of it? The freedom to choose’ (Ardone Reference Ardone2023a, 328). In saying ‘no’ to the cassata and to marriage, Oliva, like Viola, exercised her rights to freedom as a citizen.

Viola has often stated that she simply followed her heart in rejecting Melodia’s marriage offer; she was not moved by a political, social or feminist conscience. Even so, her ‘no’ triggered change, initiating a social movement and the campaign for the abolition of those articles. Ardone extends the scope of Viola’s story and has Oliva say that women gained the freedom to speak up and choose through the ‘nos’ of many other women and through collective action (Ardone Reference Ardone2023a, 322).

Franca Viola’s story reimagined for the screen

Two feature films provide strikingly different retellings of Franca Viola’s story: Damiano Damiani’s La moglie più bella (Reference Damiani1970), filmed only four years after the trial, and Marta Savina’s Primadonna (Reference Savina2022), released over 50 years later. A comparison between them not only highlights the ways in which Italian society and culture have changed substantially in half a century but also invites reflection on how the representation of mafia and gender has evolved over the same period of time. In La moglie più bella, Damiani – a professionista (professional) of the mafia movie from Il giorno della civetta (The Day of the Owl, Reference Damiani1968) to Pizza Connection (1985) (Morreale Reference Morreale and Uva2014) – is caught between two different tensions: on the one hand, the desire to tell a woman-centred story of violence and rape in a patriarchal society; on the other, the need to do so from within the parameters of a genre that Emiliano Morreale (Reference Morreale2020, 52) calls ‘melodrama for men’, directed at a mainly male audience and with a focus on male characters and their homosocial interactions. Ultimately, despite giving greater space to his female protagonist than most mafia movies to date, Damiani’s La moglie più bella is predominantly interested in describing the dynamics of the mafia world. Savina’s focus, by contrast, never wanders from her female protagonist, minimising the direct references to the mafia context. In doing so, Savina challenges the male-focused tradition of the mafia movie, offering an alternative blueprint for speaking about women, violence and mafia culture on screen. Dana Renga (Reference Renga2013, Reference Renga and Uva2014) and Veronica Vegna (Reference Vegna2017) have convincingly explained how this genre has traditionally struggled to put women at the centre of its narratives, but they have noted a shift in the last 20 years from the codified grammar of the traditional mafia movie, including its representation of female characters. Women directors such as Savina have especially contributed to this shift. Our analysis of and comparison between the two films follow this line of thought.

La moglie più bella is one of the numerous films on the mafia directed by the eclectic Damiani. Although Damiani worked across a variety of genres, from Western to sexy comedies to horror,Footnote ⁸ he saw himself as a political filmmaker, and his most influential work includes films that denounce the mafia and the collusion between corrupt institutions and organised crime in Italy. Damiani’s first mafia-centred film, the Reference Damiani1968 adaptation of Leonardo Sciascia’s novel Il giorno della civetta (Reference Sciascia1961; The Day of the Owl, Reference Sciascia1963), is recognised by critics as a milestone in the evolution of the genre and its tropes. These include the visual representation of Sicily as a wild frontier; the mafia as the unofficial institution that rules this frontier beyond the reach of the law; the arrival of the fearless stranger representative of the law (often a northern Italian) who heroically defies the criminal system but is ultimately defeated. Scholars have highlighted the intertextual references between the Italian mafia movie and the Western genre, with Pietro Garofalo (Reference Garofalo and Renga2011) discussing specifically what he calls the ‘Western flirtation’ of Il giorno della civetta. Many such visual and narrative cornerstones, which relate to male homosocial interactions, also appear in La moglie più bella. However, these elements are offset by the attempt to present the story of a woman victim of the mafia and of the strict patriarchal ideology that sustains it. Damiani called La moglie più bella ‘the first feminist Italian movie’ (see Gesù Reference Gesù and Gesù1988, 19), a statement that applies more to his aspirational intentions than to the final outcome. The title itself positions the female protagonist, Francesca Cimarosa, in the role she is expected to play within her patriarchal milieu: to become the wife of a young man keen on climbing the ranks of the mafia ladder. Vito Juvara’s (representing Melodia) decision to acquire a wife is presented in the opening scenes as a strategy to please the local boss Don Antonino, who instructs him on the principles of mafia culture: these include being married and having a family, which are essential for a man of honour. We are ten minutes into the film when we finally meet Francesca, as she is evaluated by Vito’s steely gaze. Her beauty, youth, virginity and peasant background mark her out as eminently suitable to become a mafia wife, as her looks will increase Vito’s status within his clan and her lowly origins will make her and her family easy to control. Her parents are shown as anxious but happy about the engagement. Francesca is genuinely in love and sexually attracted to Vito. The casting of the fotoromanzo stars Ornella Muti and Alessio Orani as Francesca and Vito suggests the non-coercive nature of Francesca’s early relationship with Vito, which is sincerely romantic at least on her part. Eventually, as his arrogance, his need to control her and his mafia activities become more apparent, she begins to have doubts and eventually breaks off the engagement.

Vito’s mafia connections and criminal activities continue to play a central role in the film’s narrative as Francesca’s relationship with him develops. The mafia plot unfolds in parallel to, but also independently of, Francesca’s story. Confrontations between enemy families, grandstanding dialogues between the prominent male characters, violent vendettas and Western-style shootouts occupy as much narrative space as Francesca’s plight. Francesca’s own experience becomes an added layer in the portrayal of the mafia milieu and its social structure. In this way, Damiani certainly shows a special and, for the time, new attention to the gender dynamics of mafia culture, making explicit its patriarchal mentality and its obsession with virility as a key component of the honour code. However, he also obfuscates Francesca’s tragedy, by making her experience functional to the wider social portrayal rather than presenting it as an individual trauma of violence against a woman.

The mafia world presented on screen by Damiani shows women not only as victims but also as secondary yet complicit members of that system: the older female relatives who enable Vito and his accomplices to achieve their goals; the prostitute who accepts her humiliating role as sexual entertainment for the young mafiosi in exchange for some perceived status; the chorus of village women who assault Francesca after she denounces Vito. In 1970, therefore, with the discussion surrounding Viola’s trial still fresh in the public’s mind, Damiani offered a faceted insight into the gender dynamics that underlie mafia culture, including the crucial role played by women in perpetuating it. As Renga (Reference Renga and Uva2014) has demonstrated, Damiani had already done this in Il giorno della civetta, by significantly expanding the role of Rosa (Claudia Cardinale), the widow of a mafia victim, compared with how she appears in Sciascia’s novel, thus highlighting the complex role of women in the mafia, which, as we pointed out in the introduction, scholars began to investigate only a few decades later.

The limits of Damiani’s approach in telling Viola’s story do not relate to infidelity to the true events, which he disclaims with a note at the start of the film;Footnote ⁹ rather, they lie in the fact that the film never fully articulates the devastating impact of the violence on the protagonist. Francesca’s motivations for rejecting Vito and denouncing him ultimately remain ambiguous. Time and time again we hear Vito calling her ‘proud’, with a few scenes suggesting that this may be the case. Francesca herself pleads with Vito to apologise, to publicly deny that she was a willing participant in their alleged fuitina, even hinting that she may still consider marrying him if he does so. Thus, Damiani suggests that her stance may be guided by a desire for revenge and a need to re-establish her own honour, within the same patriarchal code espoused by the mafia. Indeed, the film ends with Vito’s arrest and Francesca expressing her dismay that he may face a long imprisonment. Ultimately, therefore, Damiani rewrites Viola’s brave ‘no’ as the solitary and futile fight of a determined young woman who is herself still enmeshed in the mafia ideology that victimises her.

Savina’s first feature film, Primadonna (Reference Savina2022), which also presents itself as a fictional adaptation of Viola’s story rather than a faithful account, develops a 14-minute short film released by Savina in Reference Savina2017, whose title, Viola, Franca, leaves no doubt as to its inspiration. Savina and her cast have explained the decision to eschew direct references to Viola in the feature-length film both as a form of respect for the greatly admired real woman and as their desire to tell ‘a universal and contemporary story’, ‘representative of all women’, that would speak to a younger generation (Bonomelli Reference Bonomelli2023). In this, they echo the pedagogical intent of many of the recent prose works that rewrite Viola’s case, additionally aiming to tell a story that takes into full account the decades of societal change that have occurred in Sicily and Italy. As in Damiani’s case, a political impetus is also central to Savina’s film; in her case, however, the focus is on telling a woman’s story of victimisation by and resistance to patriarchal violence, exemplified by the extended opening shot of the protagonist Lia Crimi (Claudia Gusmano) staring directly into the camera that stands in place of a mirror: the character’s gaze is directed both at herself and at the viewers who will never lose sight of the centrality of her experience.

If Primadonna engages in a dialogue with Damiani’s film, it also remains true to its own focus: the intimate portrayal of a young woman. Indeed, Savina has explained that, while the film is ‘intrinsically political’, she chose to develop it as ‘anchored to the feelings and emotions of the protagonist’, in order to establish an emotional connection between character and audience (Ottaviani Reference Ottaviani2023). The mafia elements are made explicit only to the extent that they affect Lia and those close to her. Among such scenes are those where the male antagonist Lorenzo Musicò (Dario Aita) and his friends enter church and some of the churchgoers immediately cede their seats, or when the annual religious procession stops under the window of the local boss to pay homage to him and his family, but the pervasiveness of the mafia is otherwise suggested rather than shown in detail, except for the violence experienced by Lia and her supporters.

Unlike the protagonist’s family in Damiani’s film, Lia’s family, though poor, is proudly self-reliant and modern, independent enough to acknowledge socially the pariahs of the town, the disgraced homosexual former mayor and lawyer Andrea Orlando and the local prostitute Ines. Indeed, it is among these friends who are not quite integrated in the mainstream social structure of their town that Lia finds the support she needs: unlike Francesca in Damiani’s film, Lia is not left to fight alone. While understandably anxious, Lia’s parents are not afraid of standing by their daughter. It is precisely in the portrayal of Lia’s parents that Savina corrects the most egregious infidelity to Viola’s true story in some of its representations, such as Damiani’s film and Monroy’s book.

The film frames Lia’s ‘no’ as an act of self-determination against a personal injustice and against the patriarchy, thus showing her awareness that her rape is a crime against a person, something that Italian law ratified only in 1996. Similarly to Damiani’s Francesca with Vito, Lia is shown to be initially attracted to Lorenzo, but, unlike Francesca, who will need to witness a mafia execution ordered by Vito to finally break off the engagement, Lia does so early on when Lorenzo tells her how she should wear her hair. While Vito decides to kidnap Francesca only after he realises that his virility is being questioned by his fellow mafiosi, Lorenzo does so with Lia due to his cultural failure to accept that her rejection is indeed sincere. Moreover, the focus of the second part of Savina’s film is on the trial, and on the patriarchal, misogynistic mentality it challenges, rather than just on the arrest of the mafiosi, as in Damiani’s film, thus reiterating Savina’s determination to retell Viola’s story as that of a woman who is able to voice her personal pain.

After the protagonist’s victory in court, the film seems to head towards the standard mafia movie finale with Lia and her family ready to leave town through fear of retaliation and in the certainty that the mafia will rise again after a temporary setback. But Savina avoids this trope, showing instead the protagonist saying ‘no’ again, this time to leaving Sicily. The ending is therefore a deliberately happy and assertive one for Lia, and one that corresponds to that of Viola, who, by her own account, went on to build and enjoy a happy life in Alcamo. There, she told De Gregorio (De Gregorio and Viola Reference De Gregorio and Viola2015), she would occasionally cross paths with some of her kidnappers and they would lower their gaze.

Conclusion: Franca Viola and women’s defiance of mafia culture

We have proposed an examination of the mafia dimensions of Franca Viola’s story as they emerge in its cultural representations in the belief that they contribute to an understanding of the power of the mafia over women as an organisation that intersects with and replicates patriarchy. The prose and film adaptations discussed here all testify to the staying power of Viola’s case not only as a turning point in Italian history but also as a cultural marker that speaks across different times and contexts.

Viola’s case had a huge cultural impact from the outset, attracting the attention of Italian and international media and inspiring a major director like Damiani to make a film about the mafia that highlighted the plight of women. Through a popular film genre, he anticipated many key themes of the scholarship on women and the mafia, while remaining bound to the expectations of the male-centred mafia movie. In the last decade, several women writers and a female filmmaker have reproposed Viola’s story in order to remember a forgotten chapter of Italian history. They have done so in different ways: from the explicitly didactic aims of Palumbo’s and Centomo’s stories for young readers, to Galli’s narrative of an American-Italian’s journey of reconnection to her Sicilian roots, to the explicitly feminist retellings of Monroy, Ardone and Savina and their emphasis on the universality of Viola’s experience.

Notwithstanding the essential difference between mafia women and Franca Viola, who was a victim of mafia culture, Viola’s ‘no’ had a similar significance to the speaking up of the women who broke their ties to the mafia and chose to co-operate and collaborate with judicial authorities. By breaking the code of silence, Viola and rebellious mafia women broke the pillar of their subjugation (see Fasullo 1993, cited in Fabj Reference Fabj1998, 190) to a culture of oppression that, though affecting both genders, was particularly punishing for women. Viola was deemed to have no choice but to marry Melodia. However, she and her family rejected the culture that condoned his actions. Like some mafia women, Viola and her family decided to take the risks involved in not adhering to omertà, a practice that extends outside the mafia to the wider community. The costs for mafia women were very high: rejection by friends, economic loss and often death (Fabj Reference Fabj1998, 193). The costs were also high for the Viola family. Yet the gains were also very high, for other women and for Italian society. By rejecting the culture of tolerance of the existing order, they denounced what is corrupt in society, which is the first step towards the creation of a social movement (Fabj Reference Fabj1998, 195–196). This was the outcome of Viola’s ‘no’.

Mafia women who spoke up did so not only to obtain freedom and justice but also for the right to gain a public voice (Fabj Reference Fabj1998, 201), to encourage other mafia women to embrace civil justice and break the cycle of oppression and violence (Fabj Reference Fabj1998, 191). Viola, on the other hand, did not go on to speak publicly. Nevertheless, her ‘no’ gave other women the courage to appeal to the law, thus weakening a culture of domination through violence and inspiring the movement that led to the abolition of laws 544 and 587. Her journey towards becoming a subject and a citizen is the path of collective action towards democracy that Ardone has traced imaginatively in Oliva Denaro.

The adaptations of Viola’s story must therefore be seen not only as singular cultural efforts inspired by an exceptional individual but also as part of a wider ongoing collective effort to mobilise consciences in those who read and watch these works and especially to instil civic and civil values in new generations. If some of these works have been triggered by the recent surge in cases of violence against women in Italy and globally, they also present a culturally and geographically marked story that draws attention to the overlaps between mafia culture and patriarchal culture, which may help to dismantle both.