Dead Silent: Life Stories of Girls and Women Killed by the Italian Mafias, 1878-2018 Robin Pickering-Iazzi University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, [email protected]
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University of Wisconsin Milwaukee UWM Digital Commons French, Italian and Comparative Literature Faculty French, Italian and Comparative Literature Books Department 2019 Dead Silent: Life Stories of Girls and Women Killed by the Italian Mafias, 1878-2018 Robin Pickering-Iazzi University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.uwm.edu/freita_facbooks Part of the Criminology and Criminal Justice Commons, Italian Language and Literature Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Pickering-Iazzi, Robin, "Dead Silent: Life Stories of Girls and Women Killed by the Italian Mafias, 1878-2018" (2019). French, Italian and Comparative Literature Faculty Books. 2. https://dc.uwm.edu/freita_facbooks/2 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by UWM Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in French, Italian and Comparative Literature Faculty Books by an authorized administrator of UWM Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. DEAD SILENT: Life Stories of Girls and Women Killed by the Italian Mafias, 1878-2018 Robin Pickering-Iazzi Robin Pickering-Iazzi is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature in the Department of French, Italian, and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of The Mafia in Italian Lives and Literature: Life Sentences and Their Geographies, published in Italian as Le geografie della mafia nella vita e nella letteratura dell’Italia contemporanea, and editor of the acclaimed volumes The Italian Antimafia, New Media, and the Culture of Legality and Mafia and Outlaw Stories in Italian Life and Literature. She is currently working on a book that examines representations of feminicide in Italian literature, film, and media. Robin Pickering-Iazzi Dead Silent: Life Stories of Girls and Women Killed by the Italian Mafias, 1878-2018 Graphics and design by Hailey Ray Backus Contents Acknowledgments .............................................................................. 3 Introduction: Lived Histories of Italian Girls and Women, the Nation and the Mafias ...................................................................... 5 Life Stories of Girls and Women Killed by the Italian Mafias ........................... 23 Selected Bibliography .............................................................. 245 Acknowledgments Several Italian associations and web sites have been fundamental for researching the identities and histories of the girls and women among the thousands of individuals killed by the Italian mafias. I am deeply grateful to everyone at vittimemafia.it and Casamemoria Vittimemafia for both their creation of a virtual house of memory for all victims of the mafia and for granting me access to their photo archives. Likewise, this book owes much to the project “Vivi” by Libera. Associazioni, nomi e numeri contro le mafie;www.memoriaeimpegno.it ; www.impronteombre.it; www.stopndrangheta.it; www. ilsole24ore.com; www.napolitan.it; and www.sdisonorate. From the outset, the vast knowledge and enthusiasm generously shared by Ann M. Hanlon and Nathan A. Humpal of the UWM Digital Collections and Initiatives made it possible for me to undertake this new kind of book project. In this regard, Nigel Rothfels’s encouragement, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Office of Undergraduate Research played a critical role. With the support of their SURF Research Award, I was able to collaborate with Hailey Ray Backus, to whom I am especially indebted. Her creative powers, expertise in digital arts, and sense of graphic design shaped the very production of the book. I am also grateful to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee College of Letters and Science for a lifetime of various forms of support, and the value it places on a rich spectrum of research and public scholarship. The intellectual vitality and fellowship offered by Simonetta Milli Konewko and my colleagues have made the Department of French, Italian, and Comparative Literature a delightful place to do Italian Studies. Through their pioneering research, intellectual generosity, and friendship, Alessandra Dino, Salvatore Di Piazza, Giuseppe Muti, Marco Maggioli, Fabio Amato, Daniela De Leo, and Luciano Brancaccio have contributed to the bodies of knowledge and approaches to reconstructing the life histories of the girls, women, and the Italian mafias. I thank Paolo Iazzi for the immeasurable sustenance and love generously given during yet another journey. that important day of passage, now serves as a commemoration of her brief life, stored in digital memory. Like Marcella, all of the little girls and women whose life stories are reconstructed Introduction: in this history were victims of the deadly violence that the camorra, Cosa Nostra, and ’ndrangheta have used as a common tool since the 1800s, and the United Sacred Crown has employed since the early 1980s, when it was founded. As in Marcella’s case, the Lived Histories of Italian Girls and Women, women and children’s death was what suddenly made them newsworthy. In articles and public records, the dynamics of mafia ambushes and massacres, modalities of the the Nation and the Mafias murders and motives, as well as the killers, receive ample coverage. Yet the female victim, particularly if aged, tends to be relegated to the final lines, represented with the All memories begin with a name. bare essentials of her identity, her name and perhaps age, that were soon forgotten. As Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, La briganta, 8. their life stories reveal, a great number of young girls and women of all ages were killed while occupied in the common tasks and pastimes of everyday life. One year-old Angela Along with the right to obtain reparation and justice, the right of victims is Talluto was playing at her mother’s feet, whereas Annalisa Durante, a bright young girl precisely to be remembered. Remembered in all of their uniqueness and living in Naples, stopped to chat a moment with her cousins and friends. Stella Costa individuality. In their work and the results achieved. In their everyday died while helping her mother take out the garbage. Giovanna Elia, 67 years old and humanity. And first of all, in their name. Don Luigi Ciotti, preface to L’altra living in a town in Calabria, went out onto her balcony to escape the sweltering July heat storia, xii. in her home and get a breath of fresh air. Caught similarly unawares were women who broke unwritten mafia laws that Typing the name Marcella Tassone in your Web browser brings up several prescribe female behavior, and suffered violent death as punishment, often at the hands articles and pages, as well as images. Among the items is a photograph of a young of their own families. Lia Pipitone, for example, asserted her own desire by marrying girl with dark green eyes, who looks directly into the camera, conveying a sense of the man she loved and pursued her education in art, acting against the dictates of her liveliness. Likely taken to capture the memory of her first communion, the photograph father, a Cosa Nostra boss. Her struggle for such basic freedoms ended when she pictures Marcella in a long white dress that sets off her full head of black hair, carefully was just 25 years old, murdered in a staged robbery that was approved by her father. combed into loose curls held back from the sides of her face with white barrettes, her Although Maria Teresa Gallucci had no family ties to ’ndrangheta clans, their belief that bangs falling just above her eyebrows. In many respects, Marcella’s life was typical for marriage vows are binding beyond the grave motivated the massacre in which she died, ten year-old Italian girls of her time. She lived with her mother and father in Laureanna along with her mother and niece. Widowed when she was 25 years old, Maria later fell di Borello, a town of some 6,500 residents in the 1980s, nestled in the hills that give onto in love with a businessman. Despite their discretion, rumors spread about the so-called the Gioia Tauro plain in Calabria. Marcella enjoyed school and playing with her friends. dishonor to her dead husband, which in ’ndrangheta thought must be washed away by But what she adored most of all was popular music, listening to singers on the radio the woman’s own blood. or watching them on television variety shows. In fact, on the evening of 23 February 1989, Marcella was anxious to get home from a visit to her brother’s family because Several lives chronicled here epitomize both women’s endeavors to fight publicly she couldn’t wait to see some of her favorite singers performing at the spectacular San for freedom from fear and the mafias and the right to justice and equality, as well as the Remo music festival, broadcast on television and still watched by millions of Italians criminal tactics employed to silence them. Notable in this respect is Giuseppa Di Sano, today. With her brother Alfonso at the wheel, Marcella sat beside him as they traveled who worked with her husband in their prosperous Palermo business in the late 1800s. the usual route to their parents’ home. Blasts from a shotgun suddenly ripped through She took the rare step of reporting the mafia’s counterfeiting ring to the police. In an act the car, immediately killing Alfonso. When the car came to a stop, Marcella suffered one of vendetta against her, killers shot rifle fire into her storeroom, but hit and killed her 17 pistol shot to the nape of her neck, followed by six shots to her face, fired by members of year-old daughter, Emanuela Sansone. Giuseppa’s courageous testimony at trial links the ’ndrangheta mafia organization. Thus, the photograph of Marcella in her long white her to contemporary antimafia figures who were slain, such as Renata Fonte, Francesca dress, perhaps taken with the idea that one day she could look back at how she was on Morvillo, and Lea Garofalo.