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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/4/2019, SPi
EMOTIONS IN HISTORY
General Editors
UTE FREVERT THOMAS DIXON
Love, Honour, and

Jealousy
An Intimate History of the Italian
Economic Miracle
NIAMH CULLEN
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Niamh Cullen 2019
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2019
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
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above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
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You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
This book is for Patrick and Robin

Acknowledgements
This book was researched and written over many years and in many different
places in Ireland, Italy, and the UK. I have benefitted from the support and
advice of colleagues and friends at many stages along the way, all helping to
make it a better book.
I was able to begin the research for this book with a Irish Research Council-
Marie Skłodowska Curie CARA co-fund fellowship in 2011. This award
enabled me to spend two years at the University of Milan as a visiting fellow
and I am grateful to Emanuela Scarpellini for her support during my time
there. At University College Dublin I am thankful to David Kerr who offered
advice and support over many years, and who introduced me to the Archivio
del Diario which proved to be an invaluable resource for this book. I am
also thankful to Judith Devlin, Ivar McGrath, and the postdoctoral commu-
nity at UCD, who offered support and friendship during my time there. Ciara
Meehan has been an especially supportive friend and colleague, with whom
I shared many discussions about gender history and popular culture. In 2013
I was a visiting fellow at the Modern European History Research Centre at
Oxford and I am grateful to Jane Garnett who was so supportive during my
time there.
The final chapters of this book were completed during my time at the
University of Southampton and I am extremely grateful to my colleagues
there for the very generous support, guidance, and friendship that they offered
during these final stages. I am especially grateful to Eve Colpus, Neil Gregor,
and Joan Tumblety for taking the time to read my draft work and for their
insightful and constructive feedback. My final-year students at Southampton
were also exposed to some of the ideas and materials that make up this book
through my teaching, and our seminar discussions also helped me to refine
and rethink some of the ideas in the book.
I am very grateful to my editors at OUP, who have been so helpful and
encouraging throughout this process. First of all I would like to acknowledge
the support of the ‘Emotions in History’ series editors, Thomas Dixon and Ute
Frevert, for their interest in the book and for their advice and encouragement.
At OUP I am very thankful to Robert Faber for his initial support of the
manuscript, while it has been a pleasure to work with Christina Wipf-Perry,
who has been so helpful in the later stages of its preparation. I am also
extremely grateful to the two anonymous readers of the manuscript, both
for their thoughtful comments and critiques and for their encouragement.
Any errors that remain are of course my own.
viii Acknowledgements
Much of the research for this book was carried out in the Archivio del
Diario, Italy’s National Diary Archive, in Pieve Santo Stefano in Tuscany, and
huge thanks are owed to the archival staff who were so welcoming and helpful
to me during my time there. I am especially grateful to Cristina Cangi who has
put an enormous amount of time and effort into securing authors’ permissions
for this book. Thanks are also due to Antonella Brandizzi who supplied the
images included here. Grazie mille.
I also made use of many other archives and libraries in Italy while research-
ing this book. I am especially thankful to the staff of the archive of the UDI
(Unione Donne in Italia) organization in Rome, to the Istituto Ernesto de
Martino in Florence, and to the Archivio di Stato in Turin. I am also grateful to
the staff at the Biblioteca Braidense, the Fondazione Mondadori in Milan, the
Biblioteca Nazionale di Roma, the Biblioteca Nationale di Firenze, and the
historical archive of the Camera dei deputati in Rome.
Both the Cullen and Walsh families have been hugely supportive during
the writing of this book. Special thanks are due to my sister Maria for her help
in reading the final manuscript and to Fergal for his assistance with maps.
Finally, but most of all, thanks are due to Patrick for his tireless support,
intellectual and otherwise, and to our son Robin.
Contents
List of Figures xi
List of Abbreviations xiii
Note on Sources and Translations xv
Introduction 1
1. ‘Who to Choose?’ Finding a Suitable Marriage Partner 20
2. ‘Forgive Me, Love . . . It Was Stronger than I am’: Negotiating
Intimacy and Sexuality 53
3. Where Violence and Love Meet: Honour and Italian Society 92
4. ‘Love Means Jealousy’: A Jealousy Epidemic in Post-war Italy? 129
5. ‘The Marriage Outlaws’: Experiences of Marriage Breakdown
Before Divorce 160
Conclusion: Individuals, Families, and Nation 193
Appendices 201
Bibliography 203
Index 213
List of Figures
I.1. Map of Italy 8

1.1. Page from memoir of Laura Massini, describing her wedding 28
1.2. The importance of the corredo in getting married 40
2.1. The 1959 photo story ‘My Unknown Love’ 67
2.2. Beach cover image of Grand Hotel 68
3.1. ‘Love in White Overalls’ 93
3.2. Franca Viola 108
3.3. Map of Sicily 110
3.4. Newspaper feature about the impending trial of Filippo Melodia 115
4.1. Scribbled note ‘love means jealousy’ 134
4.2. The Magnificent Cuckold 141
4.3. ‘Jealousy’ 156
List of Abbreviations
ADN Archivio Diaristico Nazionale (National Diary Archive)

PCI Partito Comunista Italiano (Italian Communist Party)
UDI Unione Donne Italiane (Union of Italian Women). UDI is now known as
Unione Donne in Italia (Union of Women in Italy)
Note on Sources and Translations
Quotations from memoirs and diaries held at the Archivio Diaristico Nazio-
nale (ADN) are quoted with the permission of the authors or their families. In
cases where it was not possible to contact the authors or their relatives, no
direct citations or identifying details have been included by request of the
ADN. In these cases the text is identified only by first name and shelfmark.
Several of the diaries and memoirs conserved at the ADN were subsequently
published. In these cases it is indicated that the published version originated in
a text held at the ADN and that they are thus included in the sample set.
All translations from Italian are my own otherwise indicated. In my trans-
lations from the diaries and memoirs, I have tried to keep as closely as possible
to the original punctuation and syntax of the Italian text in order to best
convey the rhythms of the original text and to represent the author’s voice as
accurately as possible. Translation is always an imperfect task and necessarily
involves some measure of interpretation; any errors are of course my own.
Introduction
The day of my wedding even though I seemed happy. I was despairing

thinking of what was ahead of me. It was an obsession. I remember that
I was preparing the final details of the lunch, all alone, when they had
already rung the bells for the wedding mass [ . . . ] I got dressed in a great
hurry because I was going to be late otherwise.
Even though I very much loved the man I was marrying, to me it seemed
it was the day of my hanging. Once I arrived in the church, I saw every-
thing double, I had a splitting headache. I didn’t say anything to anyone.¹
This is how Amalia Molinelli wrote about her wedding at the age of 22. Her
words are strikingly candid and even shocking for a woman who presented
herself as happily married in middle age. Amalia was born in 1928 to a peasant
family in the northern Italian province of Emilia-Romagna and described a
happy rural adolescence, going to dances regularly at weekends. As a young
woman she had worked as a domestic servant in nearby Genoa but she
disliked the city, preferring the openness of the rural landscape. Amalia
married a local man in 1950. As the wedding drew close, she was terrified of
going to live with her husband’s family after the marriage, as was customary in
the rural north. The main emotion in her account of the wedding is fear,
although it was one that she kept hidden from everybody on the day. At the
same time, she was careful to mention how much she loved her husband, the
man to whom she would stay married for more than thirty years.
Despite the brutally honest description of how she felt on her wedding day,
Amalia’s memoir was nevertheless a carefully constructed narrative of her life.
Her childhood education did not go beyond elementary school as was typical
then for rural girls, and she wrote her memoir between 1976 and 1982, after
having returned to education to gain her middle school diploma. By this time
she was married for over twenty-five years and described herself as a house-
wife. Even though the fear and anxiety she felt on her wedding day betrays her
¹ Amalia Molinelli, I pensieri vagabondi di Amalia (Milan, 2002), p. 43. A copy is also kept at
the Archivio Diaristico Nazionale (ADN).
2 Love, Honour, and Jealousy

deep ambivalence at that point, it seemed in writing her memoir that love had
to be a part of the narrative of marriage. In 1950, marriage in Italy was still
firmly seen as a lifelong commitment and any debates about divorce were far
from her consciousness as a young woman.
Almost ten years later, Livia Colasanti would have a very different experi-
ence of romantic partnership. Born in 1937 to a middle-class family in Rome,
Livia’s childhood was urban and affluent. She remembered long periods of
leisure in her childhood with the family spending summers on the beach at
Ostia, just outside Rome. Her early teenage years were also marked by the rise
of consumerism and popular culture; particularly fashion and music. At 15 she
began work, while also taking a secretarial course at night and starting what
she described as a good, solid job at the age of 21. She had met her partner
Dario the previous year in 1957. He was married, although separated. In 1964
Livia became pregnant and went to live with Dario. Although her immediate
family accepted the situation, a wedding reception was held in order to save
face in front of the extended family, with the fiction that a private ceremony
had taken place beforehand. The ‘farce’ involved a full reception in a bar facing
the Tiber, and a honeymoon in Florence. Uneasy recalling it even many years
later in her memoir, Livia compared the staged wedding to ‘a comedy, a
scenario from a 1950s film’, and likened herself and Dario to the couple in a
posed publicity photograph of a bride and groom in St Peter’s Square. The
growing media focus on marriage and romantic love in film, music, and
advertising evident by the 1960s was, in her view, at odds with the reality of
her situation.
She left Dario nine months after her daughter was born. She asked ‘how
could I have lived with a man who was unfaithful, who did not share my
politics and who even mocked my views [ . . . ]?’.² In Livia’s memoir, the notion
of romantic love provided a measure against which her own relationship was
tested and failed, unlike in Amalia’s narrative where love was presented as a
seamless and barely examined component of the marriage. The commercial-
ization of romantic love only highlighted the discordance of the staged
wedding of Livia and Dario. Livia’s memoir contained a much clearer notion
of what an ideal romantic partnership would include, and she was certain that
her own experience with Dario did not live up to her ideals. The differences
between Amalia’s and Livia’s attitudes towards marriage and love are a sharp
illustration of an Italy in transformation, not just in material circumstances
but in attitudes, expectations, and feelings. Although both women wrote their
memoirs in middle age, their attitudes were clearly shaped by the world in
which they came of age. In Amalia’s case this was the rural north where the
needs of family were placed above all else, while in 1960s Rome, Livia could
² Livia Colasanti, ‘Il sapore della cioccolata’, MP/10, ADN.

Introduction 3
have a job and enjoy fashion, popular music, and film. Crucially, the two
women differed not just in their experiences but in how they made sense of
their lives and their futures. Unlike Amalia, Livia was able to imagine that her
life could be different.
This book will explore the story not just of how practices of courtship and
marriage changed in Italy between 1945 and 1974, but how it became possible
for Italian men and women to think about their lives, emotions, and their
choices differently. It will do so by drawing closely on a large body of mostly
memoirs and diaries, set against the context of the popular culture that these
men and women absorbed in their youth and young adulthood. In its focus
on the ordinary lives of Italians, this book aims to write a social history of
emotions during Italy’s economic miracle. In doing so it pays an important
debt to the growing number of historians investigating the modern history
of love, courtship, and marriage, including Claire Langhamer, Simon Szreter,
and Kate Fisher on England, Dagmar Herzog on sexuality in Europe, Hester
Vaizey, Paul Betts, and Josie McLellan on modern Germany, and Rebecca
Pulju and Sarah Fishman on France.³ Emotions have also been commanding
attention in modern Italian history, notably with the work of Mark Seymour
and Penny Morris.⁴ Meanwhile the work of Anna Tonelli and Maria Porzio on
the politics of love and sexuality and of Enrica Asquer on middle-class life
during the economic boom, make valuable contributions to the history of
³ Claire Langhamer, The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution
(Oxford, 2013); Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in
England 1918–1973 (Cambridge, 2010); Dagmar Herzog, Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth
Century History (Cambridge, 2011); Hester Vaizey, Surviving Hitler’s War: Family Life in
Germany, 1939–1948 (London, 2010); Josie McLellan, Love in the Time of Communism:
Intimacy and Sexuality in the GDR (Cambridge, 2011); Paul Betts, Within Walls: Private Life
in the German Democratic Republic (Oxford, 2010); Rebecca Pulju, ‘Finding a Grand Amour in
Marriage in Postwar France’, in Kristin Celello and Hanan Kholoussy (eds), Domestic Tensions,
National Anxieties: Global Perspectives on Modern Marriage Crises (Oxford, 2015); and Sarah
Fishman, From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France
(Oxford, 2017), pp. 126–46. Other works specifically on the history of romantic love take a
more cultural and intellectual perspective: see William Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love:
Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia and Japan, 900–1200 CE (Chicago, 2012) and
Luisa Passerini, Women and Men in Love: European Identities in the Twentieth Century
(New York, 2009).
⁴ See Penny Morris, ‘A Window on the Private Sphere: Advice Columns, Marriage and the
Evolving Family in 1950s Italy’, The Italianist, 27:2 (2007), pp. 304–32 and ‘Feminism and
Emotion: Love and the Couple in the Magazine Effe’, Italian Studies, 68:3 (2013), pp. 378–98;
Mark Seymour, ‘Epistolary Emotions: Exploring Amorous Hinterlands in 1870s Southern Italy’,
Social History, 35:2 (2010) pp. 148–64 and ‘Emotional Arenas: from Provincial Circus to
National Courtroom in Late Nineteenth-century Italy’, Rethinking History, 16:2 (2012),
pp. 177–97. See also Martyn Lyons, ‘ “Questo cor che tuo si rese”: The Private and the Public
in Italian Women’s Love Letters in the Long Nineteenth Century’, Modern Italy, 19:4 (2014),
pp. 355–68 and Penny Morris, Francesco Ricatti, and Mark Seymour (eds), Modern Italy: Special
Issue on the Emotions, 17:2 (2012), pp. 151–285.

sexuality and intimate life.⁵ This book builds on this work, and through its use
of first-person writing, provides new and original insights into the social
history of love, sexuality, and marriage with implications not just for Italy
but more broadly for Europe in the same period.
FROM POST-WAR RUIN TO PROSPERITY:

THE I TALIAN ECONOMIC MIRACLE
The contrast between the perspectives of Amalia and Livia on love and
marriage illustrate the extent of Italy’s transformation in the decades following
the war. A peasant woman marrying in 1950 and a middle-class woman in
1960s Rome, the two women are divided by place and class but also by time.
Italy in the early 1950s was still largely a poor and rural society, recently
ravaged by war, socially conservative, and deeply divided. Even as the new
Italian Republic sought to distance itself from the recent past, the memory of
fascism and the trauma of war were still present in many minds. The men and
women at the centre of this book, coming to adulthood in the post-war period,
had mostly experienced fascism as children and some as adolescents. Few of
the men had been old enough to fight in the war, but they would likely have
participated in fascist youth organizations where they imbibed the message
of martial masculinity, just as girls received messages about fascist mother-
hood: traditional, submissive, and prolific.⁶ The reactionary gender politics of
fascism ultimately had little demographic impact although it is altogether
more difficult to gauge the impression these messages made on young Italians.
The retrenched position of the Catholic Church combined with Cold War
politics to make post-war Italy a society that was both conservative and deeply
divided.⁷ As a legacy of the antifascist resistance, Italy had the largest Com-
munist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, or PCI) in Western Europe after
1945, creating two strong opposing ideologies with deep roots in society.
Communism and Catholicism were not just about politics and religion; each
⁵ Maria Porzio, Arrivani gli alleati! Amori e violenze nell’Italia liberata (Rome, 2011); Anna
Tonelli, Gli irregolari: Amori comunisti al tempo della Guerra Fredda (Rome, 2014); Enrica
Asquer, Storia intima dei ceti medi: Una capitale e una periferia nell’Italia del miracolo economico
(Rome, 2011).
⁶ The literature on gender and fascism is extensive. See especially Sandro Bellassai, ‘The
Masculine Mystique: Antimodernism and Virility in Fascist Italy’, Journal of Modern Italian
Studies, 10 (2005), pp. 314–35; Paul Ginsborg, Family Politics: Domestic Life, Devastation and
Survival 1900–1950 (New Haven, CT, 2014), pp. 139–225; Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism
Ruled Women (Berkeley, CA, 2000); and Natasha Chang, Shaping the New Woman: Body Politics
and the New Woman in Fascist Italy (Toronto, 2015).
⁷ See Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, 1943–1980 (London, 1990).
Introduction 5
one was also a way of life, with social life being organized around the party for
PCI members and many millions of Italians belonging to Catholic Action and
other Catholic and youth organizations.⁸ The Catholic Church of the 1950s
continued to fight the battle against both communism and modernity by
focusing on gender and sexuality, and the principal target was the purity of
girls and young women.⁹ Catholicism was especially strong in the north and
north-east of Italy, while in the south local tradition also contributed to a
social and cultural climate that was deeply conservative in its attitudes towards
women. The PCI, strong in the north and central regions, did little in practice
to change deeply entrenched ideas about gender roles.¹⁰ In a society that was
still predominantly rural, the strongest influence remained that of the family.
In the south of Italy, in Sicily and Calabria in particular, the notion of family
honour also played an important part in the regulation of women’s lives.
These attitudes and customs led in extreme cases to crimes of honour, which
were regularly in the news, and forced marriages which, with the exception of
the 1965 case of Franca Viola, tended to remain private matters.
By the late 1950s and early 1960s, a very different Italy was beginning to
emerge. The ‘economic miracle’ of the industrial north began to take off in the
late 1950s, sparking widespread migration to Milan, Turin, and Genoa and
more generally from rural to urban Italy. It is estimated that at least nine million
and up to twenty-five million Italians (roughly half the entire population) were
on the move in these years.¹¹ Not all of these moved far enough to be properly
considered migrants, but it is also certain that the real number of internal
migrants was far above the official figures for these years. This unprecedented
wave of migration, predominantly from rural to urban Italy, undoubtedly
changed Italian society. The rise of prosperity and consumer culture trans-
formed the ordinary lives of millions of Italians both in material terms and in
⁸ See David Forgacs and Stephen Gundle, Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the
Cold War (Bloomington, IN, 2007), pp. 247–68; Sandro Bellasai, La morale comunista: Pubblico e
privato nella rappresentazione del Pci (1947–1956) (Rome, 2001); and David Kertzer, Comrades
and Christians. Religion and Political Struggle in Communist Italy (Cambridge, 1980).
⁹ Percy Allum, ‘Uniformity Undone: Aspects of Catholic Culture in Post-war Italy’, in
Zygmunt Baranski and Robert Lumley (eds), Culture and Conflict in post-war Italy: Essays on
Mass and Popular Culture, (London, 1990); Patrick McCarthy, ‘The Church in Post War Italy’, in
Patrick McCarthy (ed.), Italy since 1945 (Oxford, 2000).
¹⁰ Maria Casalini, Famiglie comuniste: Ideologie e vita quotidiana nell’Italia degli anni ’50
(Bologna, 2010).
¹¹ Ginsborg reports the figure of just over nine million for intra-regional migration between
1955 and 1971 while Crainz reports a figure of approximately ten million for intra-regional
migration: A History of Contemporary Italy, p. 219; Guido Crainz, Storia del miracolo economico:
Culture, identità, trasformazioni (Rome, 2005), p. 108. The disparities and the lack of precise
figures can be explained by the fact that a 1939 law designed to limit migration from rural
areas—only repealed in 1961—made it very difficult for migrants to establish legal residency in
their new town or city. See also Stefano Gallo, Senza attraversare le frontiere: Le migrazioni
interne dall’Unità a oggi (Rome, 2012).

their values.¹² The rise of mass culture, from cinema and popular illustrated
magazines in the early 1950s to television in the late 1950s and 1960s, also
transformed identities and perspectives from local to national and transna-
tional. The influence of family and religion on young Italians was giving way to
modern secular values, while the popularization of the notion of ‘companionate
marriage’ and the growing commercialization of romantic love in Italy as
elsewhere transformed expectations of marriage and increasingly placed the
burden of choice on individuals rather than on their families. The opportunities
afforded to women were changing too, and new ideas about gender influenced
attitudes towards courtship and marriage. Of course, these processes were not
as simple or as linear as this narrative might suggest, and this book will explore
those complexities.
Those born in the 1940s and coming of age in the mid to late 1960s
inherited a very different world to those born during the previous decade.
Although they might have (barely) lived through the war as children, theirs
was an Italy which quickly left behind the austerity and conservatism of the
early 1950s for Italy’s ‘miraculous’ 1960s. This generation was likely to receive
a better education than previous generations, with the numbers attending
secondary school and university expanding rapidly in these years.¹³ By the late
1960s, many of this generation also began to reject the consumerism of the
boom years, and the social conformism it fostered, dismissively summarized
as the ‘three Ms’: ‘macchina, moglie e mestiere’ (car, wife, and profession).¹⁴ In
rejecting the consumerism of the boom years, some also rejected the conven-
tional model of marriage and family, experimenting with new forms of love
and commitment. While the Italian ’68 is not central to the story of this book,
several of the men and women discussed here were involved in the wider
movement and had their experiences of love and sexuality shaped by the
culture of those years. The Italian feminist movement which grew out of ’68
was also crucial to the lives of some of the women, transforming their attitudes
to marriage and family, with several women even coming to 1970s feminism in
later life as married women. In these cases the encounter was often a catalyst
for change, although most memoirs described a gradual shift in outlook rather
than a sudden transformation.
In a more general sense, this book aims to tell the story not of activists or of
those central to the counterculture of the late 1960s and the social movements
of the 1970s but rather of those at the periphery. We will see how the ordinary
¹² Emanuela Scarpellini, Material Nation: A Consumer’s History of Italy (Oxford, 2011),

pp. 109–224; Simonetta Piccone Stella, La prima generazione: Ragazze e ragazzi del miracolo
economico italiano (Turin, 1993).
¹³ Robert Lumley, States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978 (London,
1990); Anna Tonelli, Comizi d’amore: Politica e sentimenti dal ‘68 ai Papa boys (Rome, 2007);
Anna Bravo, A colpi di cuore: Storie del sessantotto (Rome, 2008).
¹⁴ Guido Crainz, Storia del miracolo italiano, p. 143.
Introduction 7
lives examined in this book reveal a different 1960s to the narrative of
liberalization that emerges in popular culture and through a singular focus
on ’68. Indeed the intention of this book is to complicate and to challenge this
narrative. It is not just, as we will see, that expectations did not always match
reality and that development was uneven, as was the case particularly in rural
Italy and in the south. We must also take account that, as with jealousy, change
did not always move in a straightforward, liberal direction. Moreover, it is
worth noting that not all experiences are addressed in the book. The absence
of homosexuality is a reflection of the strong heteronormativity of the sources,
whether those drawn from the media and popular culture or the personal
texts. Different sources would have been needed to uncover these hidden
experiences; what we see in the diaries and memoirs here examined are the
attempts that ordinary people made to place themselves and their experiences
in relation to dominant discourses rather than (for the most part) in defiance
of them.¹⁵ We can only speculate about what stories might be further hidden.
Let us now turn to the personal narratives that are so central to this new story
of post-war Italian society.
FIRST-PERSON WRITING: THE NARRATORS
A sample set of 142 first-person texts are used in this book, all drawn from the
texts collected in Italy’s National Diary Archive, located in Pieve Santo Stefano
in Tuscany. While the majority of the texts are memoirs, some are diaries (most
of these were adolescent diaries detailing school and university life, although
they include one by a woman office worker and one by a male migrant worker
in 1950s Germany). The criteria for inclusion in the sample set were broadly
defined: all writers born between 1926 and 1946 (and thus growing up
and coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s) and where at least some detail of
either love, sexuality, courtship, or marriage were included. This amounted to
fifty-nine texts by men and eighty-three by women. The texts vary greatly in
length and style, and in the level of detail they provide. Some have been used
extensively, analysed in terms of language and structure as well as content,
while others simply confirmed patterns and trends. Although the sample set
¹⁵ Scholars have recently devoted much attention to uncovering the history of Italian homo-
sexuality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although more needs to be done for
the late twentieth century. These works include Chiara Beccalosi, ‘The Origin of Italian Sexo-
logical Studies: Female Sexual Inversion c. 1870–1900’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 18:1
(2009), pp. 103–20; Lorenzo Benadusi, The Enemy of the New Man: Homosexuality in Fascist
Italy (Wisconsin, 2012); Charlotte Ross, Eccentricity and Sameness: Discourses on Lesbianism
and Desire Between Women in Italy, 1960s to 1930s (Oxford, 2015); and Valeria Babini, Chiara
Beccalosi, and Lucy Riall (eds), Italian Sexualities Uncovered, 1789–1914 (London, 2015).

happens to have a slightly higher representation of women than men, that is
not to suggest that men did not consider love, courtship, and sexuality import-
ant to their lives. Many of the men considered in these pages actually wrote in
huge detail and with great intensity about these aspects of their lives. At the
same time, men were also more likely to write a diary or memoir of work,
career, or politics, compartmentalizing their experiences of intimacy or family.
In terms of geographical spread, the twenty Italian regions were fairly equally
represented (see Figure I.1). The male writers were very evenly spread across
Italy, with twenty-two from northern Italy, twenty from the central regions,
and twenty from the south, including Sicily and Sardinia. The women were
Trentino-
Friuli-
Alto Adige
venezia
Valle d'Aosta Giulia
Lombardia Veneto
Piemonte
Emilia-Romagna
Liguria
Toscana Marche
Umbria
Lazio Abruzzo
Molise
Campania Puglia
Basilicata
Sardegna
Calabria
Sicilia
Figure I.1. Map of Italy, showing the regional provenance of the diarists and memoir-
ists as per Appendix 1.
<http://www.geocurrents.info/cartography/customizable-base-maps-of-italy>.
Introduction 9
more likely to be from northern Italy (thirty-nine), with twenty coming
from central Italy and twenty-three from the south. Urban, provincial, and
rural backgrounds were also all strongly represented. The cultural position of
women in the south of Italy, which often meant a more secluded life and
lower levels of education and participation in the workforce, may explain the
lower number of southern women writers as well as the relative silence on
certain topics.¹⁶
Class is difficult to gauge precisely from the texts. The diarists are over-
whelmingly middle and upper class, while the backgrounds of the memoirists
are much more diverse. Although less than half of the authors gave definite
information on their class or family background, the partial information given
suggests that class is fairly evenly represented (see Appendix 1). At least eleven
men and sixteen women memoirists came from peasant backgrounds, while
the regions were also fairly evenly represented in the rural memoirs.¹⁷
Although the majority of the Italian population was rural until the onset of
the economic miracle, the experiences of peasants are difficult for historians to
access, beyond regionally specific works such as Nuto Revelli’s extremely
valuable oral histories of Piedmont.¹⁸ These texts thus represent the enormous
value of the National Diary Archive.¹⁹ The strong representation of working-
class and peasant memoirists can perhaps be explained by the Italian tradition
of popular testimony, which was linked to post-war left-wing political tradi-
tions and cultivated in particular by the Diary Archive.
The writers were more likely to disclose their own educational achievement
than their family background, and on the subject of education we see a strong
gender disparity (see Appendix 2). Although the typical pattern for peasant
families up to the 1950s was for boys to attend school until 10 or 11, the male
memoirists from peasant backgrounds were often atypical in that they had
completed middle school or gone on to further education.²⁰ Very few of them
¹⁶ See Perry Willson, Women in Twentieth Century Italy (London, 2009), pp. 71–3 and
117–18 and Simonetta Piccone Stella, Ragazze del sud: Famiglie, figlie, studentesse in una città
meridionale (Rome, 1979).
¹⁷ Of the ten men from peasant backgrounds, one was from northern Italy, four from the
south (including Sicily and Sardinia), and five from the central provinces. The women were
spread more evenly: five were from northern Italy, four from the south, and six from
central Italy.
¹⁸ Nuto Revelli, Il mondo dei vinti: Testimonianze di vita contadina (Turin, 1977) and Nuto
Revelli, L’anello forte. La donna: storie di vita contadina (Turin, 1985).
¹⁹ Peasant or ‘contadino’ is generally used to refer to both small farmers and landless rural
labourers in Italy. Rudolph M. Bell states that he uses the term ‘to refer to all agricultural manual
labourer categories noted above (smallholders, landless and ambiguous) and specifically to
exclude substantial landholders and agricultural capitalists and middlemen’. Quoted in ‘ “What
is a Peasant?” ’, in Rudolph M. Bell, Fate, Honor, Family and Village: Demographic and Cultural
Change in Rural Italy Since 1800 (Chicago, 1979).
²⁰ Compulsory secondary school education until the age of 14 was only made legal in 1962:
see Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, p. 298.

remained peasants, moving away from the land by means of education,
vocational training, or simply migration. In this sense they were typical of
their time. The women peasant memoirists were more likely to complete
only three years of elementary school, leaving school at 8 or 9. Some remained
on the land while others migrated after marriage. Three of them went back to
education in later life, typically completing middle school after their children
were raised. This later experience of education equipped them with the tools
and perhaps the motivation to write their memoirs. While Italian women in
general were more restricted in their access to education, those writers with
university degrees were disproportionately women. Women graduates were an
elite group in 1950s and 1960s Italy and it was perhaps their status as unusual
women that prompted the decision to write their memoir or submit an
adolescent diary to the archive.
FIRST-PERSON WRITING: NARRATIVE, MEMORY,

EMOTION, AND L ANGUAGE
The analysis of such a set of personal testimonies, and particularly memoirs,

presents both challenges and possibilities for the historian. As the oral histor-
ian Alessandro Portelli comments, such sources ‘tell us less about events than
about their meaning’.²¹ They do not so much tell us about people’s life
experiences, as about how they understood their own lives. For the historian
interested in individual experience, attitude, and feeling, the worth of such
sources lies precisely in their subjectivity. Memoirs, as carefully constructed
written documents, also present their own particular challenges for the
historian. Here they will be discussed in terms of narrative, memory, and
language.
Rather than forming a simple record of experience, a memoir, as with an
oral testimony, always presents a narrative of the self.²² Mary Evans has argued
that autobiography is impossible, since the need for narrative coherence erases
any true sense of self or real experience.²³ While her focus was on literary
autobiography, Evans was concerned to draw attention to the ‘increasingly
problematic negotiation of the boundaries between the public and the private’,
and how this might lead an author to construct a self that was acceptable both
²¹ Alessandro Portelli, ‘The Peculiarities of Oral History’, History Workshop Journal, 12:2
(1981), pp. 96–107; p. 99.
²² On oral testimony as narrative of the self, see also Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher, Sex Before
the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918–1963 (Cambridge, 2010), p. 51 and Luisa
Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968 (Middletown, CT, 1996), pp. 22–36.
²³ Mary Evans, Missing Persons: The Impossibility of Auto/biography (London, 1999).
Introduction 11
to the author and to society.²⁴ The authors examined in this book sometimes
gave their reasons for writing; usually along the lines of ‘to make a record of
the past’ or ‘to write my story for my family’. While the texts were usually not
written explicitly for publication, they were all deposited in a national archive
and thus intended in some form for public consumption.²⁵ As such, they
straddle the boundary between public and private. Naturally the authors made
choices about how to present themselves in selecting which details to include
or emphasize and which to leave out, how to order events, and in what tone to
describe them. Politics, religion, nostalgia, or defining events such as an
unhappy childhood or marriage might also provide a narrative framework
to give shape and meaning to the life story.
None of this devalues these sources for the historian; far from it. Rather it
means that careful and close reading that pays attention to the shape of the
text as well as the material it presents, and looks closely for gaps and silences,
can yield further clues about how we relate ordinary lives to the wider
historical picture.²⁶ Honour crime and kidnap marriage, although practised
in Sicily at least until the early 1970s, rarely cropped up in the first-person
texts, except sometimes as background or family history. The one memoir
dealing with a personal experience of kidnap marriage was excluded from the
book on the author’s request, indicating that even in the present day some
issues remain difficult to discuss openly. Homosexuality is almost never
mentioned in the texts, and was indeed absent from public discourse before
the 1970s. Even for those writing their memoirs from the 1980s to the 2000s,
their formative years were lived at a time when such matters were not for
public discussion.²⁷ Indeed, with the exception of those who ‘converted’ to a
new outlook or ideology such as feminism in later life, formative experience
was key.
At the same time, the texts were often surprisingly candid about other
matters of sexuality and emotions. The men sometimes gave detailed accounts
of pre-marital sexuality, as well as jealous and controlling behaviour in roman-
tic relationships. Women tended to be more reticent about pre-marital
²⁴ Evans, Missing Persons, p. 12.

²⁵ The archive now holds more than 6,500 autobiographical texts: see <http://www.ar
chiviodiari.org>. It is also increasingly exploited by historians of modern Italy. Christopher
Duggan’s Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy (London, 2012) for instance
drew extensively on the archive’s diary holdings. Perry Willson also drew on the archive’s
correspondence and memoir holdings in her article, ‘The Nation in Uniform? Fascist Italy
1919–1943’, Past and Present, 221 (2013), pp. 239–72. Some have been published by the archive
itself; an annual competition, the Premio Pieve, is held by the archive, with publication as the
prize. At the same time, those who deposit their texts retain the right of refusal to any
public usage.
²⁶ For further discussion, see Szreter and Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution, pp. 1–19, 51.
²⁷ See Sandro Bellassai, La mascolinità contemporanea (Milan, 2004).

sexuality, but a surprising number disclosed negative feelings about marriage,
while remaining married to their spouse. In a memoir written primarily for
his family, one man gave a frank and detailed account of his marital infidelity.
It seems that infidelity was not in conflict with certain constructions of Italian
masculinity, while we can assume that homosexual behaviour was much more
threatening. With many of these men growing up during fascism with the
hyper-masculine fascist ‘new man’ as official role model—with virility prized
and homosexuality silenced and persecuted as unmanly—the internalized
notion of what was and was not manly behaviour is perhaps not surprising.²⁸
At the same time it could be said that the regime simply amplified and gave
official credence to pre-existing attitudes, and the book will explore both
continuities and moments of rupture.
When examining a memoir as opposed to a diary, written at some distance
from the events described, we must take into account the two kinds of
temporality that are at play; the time of the events described and the time of
writing.²⁹ Carolyn Steedman was very much aware of this when recalling her
working-class childhood in her memoir. Although she knew as an adult that
aspects of her upbringing were unusual, she insisted that ‘I don’t remember the
oddness; it’s a reconstruction’.³⁰ We might also take into account what Mary
Jo Maynes described as ‘the interplay between norms and experiences’, when,
in a rapidly changing society such as Italy during the boom, the promise of
expanding opportunity and affluence created greater discontent about
people’s own circumstances.³¹ We can see this acutely in the contrast between
the memoirs of those who came of age in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and
those who reached adulthood at the onset of the economic miracle, as is
evident in the contrast between the narration of the stories of Amalia and
Livia. It is in this complex interaction between what might be termed historical
and personal time that we may begin to understand how individuals under-
stand their own lives in times of rapid social change.
²⁸ On fascism and virility, see Sandro Bellasai, ‘The Masculine Mystique: Antimodernism and
Virility in Fascist Italy’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 10:3 (2005), pp. 314–35; Silvana
Patriarca, Italian Vices: Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the Republic (Cambridge,
2010), pp. 133–60; and Martina Salvante, ‘Less Than a Bootrag: Procreation, Paternity and the
Masculine Ideal in Fascist Italy’, in Pablo Dominguez Anderson and Simon Wendt (eds),
Masculinities and the Nation in the Modern World (London, 2015), pp. 93–112. On fascism
and homosexuality, see Lorenzo Benadusi, The Enemy of the New Man: Homosexuality in Fascist
Italy (Madison, WI, 2012).
²⁹ Mary Jo Maynes et al., Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences
and History (Ithaca, NY, 2008), p. 3.
³⁰ Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London, 1986),
p. 44.
³¹ Mary Jo Maynes, Taking the Hard Road: Life Course in French and German Workers’
Autobiographies in the Era of Industrialisation (Chapel Hill, 1995), p. 12.
Introduction 13
Psychology and neuroscience also offer us ways of thinking about time and
memory as they are organized by the human mind rather than the calendar.³²
Nancy Chodorow suggests that when an experience evokes strong emotions, it
cannot be confined to one moment in time, but may be relived in the telling.³³
Oral historians have also described how interviewees often become caught up
in the moment they are recollecting.³⁴ Detailed descriptions of the rituals
surrounding the wedding, and especially its material aspects, such as food,
clothing, and the trousseau, often indicated the personal and social signifi-
cance of these events for men and women. I also came across several instances
of traumatic events—particularly women’s accounts of sexual violence—being
recorded in crisp, clear detail in the memoirs. Amalia’s wedding day was
recalled with equal clarity. The level of detail and the clarity of recollection
signals the importance of these events in the life story.
Some of the memoirs, especially those written by people from peasant
backgrounds, tend to resemble oral testimonies rather than more carefully
constructed written documents, in their meandering styles and their tendency
to jump back and forth across time.³⁵ It has been suggested that this is also a
particular feature of how women write about their lives.³⁶ Digressions were
frequent in such narratives, with the structure of the text illustrating the
meandering quality of memory, which had the ability to forge new links across
time and space, triggered by a single thought, sound, smell, or taste. In general
I found that men tended to be open and direct about their life experiences,
while women were often more careful, guarded, and ambivalent, since to
admit unhappiness in marriage, particularly for those older women who grew
up before the miracle, was barely thinkable. These memoirs required some
detective work in order to ‘read’ the feelings and attitudes they encoded.³⁷ The
memoir of rural woman Laura Massini (Tuscany, 1930) for example, was
meandering and episodic, although a closer look revealed that digression also
served a more serious purpose, filling silences and diverting attention from
uncomfortable subjects. The grammar, filled with qualifiers and the passive
voice, also betrayed an ambivalence that could not be directly articulated.³⁸
³² William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of the Emotions
(Cambridge, 2001), pp. 3–33.
³³ Nancy Chodorow, The Power of Feelings (New Haven, CT, 1999).
³⁴ Alessandro Portelli, ‘The Peculiarities of Oral History’, pp. 99–100; also referenced in Mary
Jo Maynes et al., Telling Stories, pp. 73–4.
³⁵ One testimony was actually a recorded oral testimony: MP/85, ADN.
³⁶ Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (eds), Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (Madison,
WI, 1998), pp. 9–10.
³⁷ Barbara Rosenwein reminds us to tease out emotions from less obvious and hidden places:
Jan Plamper, ‘The History of the Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara
Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns’, History and Theory, 49:2 (2010), pp. 237–65, 250.
³⁸ Laura Massini, ‘Domani è un altro giorno’, MP/91, ADN. For further discussion see
Chapter 1.
THINKING ABOUT E MOTIONS IN POST-WAR ITALY
Even in autobiographical writings dealing with personal, emotive topics, we can

still struggle to pin down the relationship between words and feelings. Yet
historians have been thinking carefully about how to uncover and examine
emotions in the past. William Reddy’s concept of emotives is used to describe
utterances about feelings. He has defined them as ‘at once managerial and
exploratory’, since they serve the double purpose of evoking and naming the
feeling at the same time.³⁹ They are essentially the imperfect translation of
feeling into language and as such Reddy offers a way of thinking beyond Peter
Stearns’ emotionology, defined as the language surrounding emotional norms
and standards which for him was always separate to actual emotional experi-
ence.⁴⁰ By drawing attention to the way in which language necessarily structures
thought and feeling in both the availability and absence of suitable words, Reddy
does not negate the relationship between words and real emotions.
Language is not the only way we communicate emotions though.⁴¹ For
Monique Scheer, emotions are things people do rather than simply feel. They
are both always embodied and, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, always grounded
in their social context.⁴² Scheer thus offers another way of thinking beyond the
distinction that Stearns drew between real emotions and the emotional stand-
ards of a society at a particular point in time. Love, hate, or jealousy can be
encouraged or shaped by the world people live in, but that does not mean that
the emotions are not deeply felt at a personal level. It is simply not up to the
historian to distinguish or to judge which emotion, as named or recounted in a
diary or memoir, is ‘real’ (whatever that means) and which is not. Thinking
about emotions as both embodied practices and as always embedded in a
social habitus is a useful way of thinking about how and why people drew on
certain vocabularies rather than others, or even failed to articulate what one
might expect at a certain point in time. Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus
draws our attention to the largely invisible social workings of power—what
Scheer terms ‘the politics of emotion’—and the unequal power relationships to
which people often unconsciously subscribe, whether in terms of gender, class,
regional, or ethnic difference.⁴³
³⁹ Plamper, ‘The History of the Emotions’, p. 240; Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling.
⁴⁰ Plamper, ‘The History of the Emotions’, pp. 261–5. The term emotionology was originally
coined by Peter and Carol Stearns in their article, ‘Emotionology: Clarifying the History of
Emotions and Emotional Standards’, American Historical Review, 90:4 (1980), pp. 813–36.
⁴¹ Jan Plamper has criticized Reddy for neglecting other forms of emotional expression in
‘The History of the Emotions’, pp. 241–2. Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice
(And is that What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding
Emotions’, History and Theory, 51:2 (2012), pp. 193–220.
⁴² Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?’, pp. 204–7.
⁴³ Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?’, p. 208.
Introduction 15
If emotions are also embodied, then the historian must pay attention to
their physical expression as well as the language of emotions. The first-person
texts—and indeed the magazine features, stories, and advice columns used in
this book—did sometimes describe bodily expressions of emotion. Amalia
described her experience of what seemed like a migraine headache on her
wedding day, apparently brought on by the extreme anxiety and fear of her
impending marriage. In both personal testimony and mass media sources,
jealousy was the emotion most often described in physical terms, often even as
an illness. Even emotions which were very much embedded within the social
and cultural context of the time—as this book will argue was the case for
jealousy in post-war Italy—were inscribed quite firmly on the body.
Neither are emotions merely individual experiences. The fact that there
were shared vocabularies of the emotions in post-war Italy indicates that
emotions also have a collective, social meaning, and examining them in this
context is a key concern of this book. Close attention is paid to the interplay
between the personal and the wider socio-cultural context, paying particular
attention to popular magazines and film. Livia Colasanti’s memoir illustrates
how, as a young woman coming of age in early 1960s Rome, ideas and
expectations of romantic partnership were in part shaped by popular music
and film. Values, habits, and lexicons of feeling are of course shared by
families, peer groups, and communities as well as religious, political, or even
national groups. Emotions undoubtedly change over time, falling in and out of
use according to the needs, values, and conventions of a society.
The example of honour which Ute Frevert argues can be considered as an
emotion, is a particularly vivid example of an emotion only given shape by the
values of a particular social group.⁴⁴ Up until the early twentieth century,
upper-class men in the European and US traditions were prepared to kill and
die to defend their intangible but deeply felt sense of masculine honour.
Without the duel to give ritual shape to these feelings, honour is no longer
sincerely and intensely felt among Western European men.⁴⁵ In Italy and
across the Mediterranean, a different sort of honour connected to both
masculinity and family, and measured by the sexual chastity of wives, sisters,
and daughters, was gradually falling out of use in the 1960s as it had in earlier
decades elsewhere in Europe.⁴⁶ As we will see, these feelings may have taken a
different form rather than disappearing altogether. At the same time it is
certain that the protracted public demise of honour in the post-war decades, as
⁴⁴ Ute Frevert, Emotions in History: Lost and Found (Budapest, 2011), pp. 39–41.
⁴⁵ Frevert, Emotions Lost and Found, pp. 40–65. See also Kevin McAleer, Dueling: The Cult of
Honor in Fin-de-Siècle Germany (Princeton, NJ, 1997).
⁴⁶ Ruth Harris’s work on crime in nineteenth-century Paris argues that while honour and
passion were recognized as mitigating factors in crimes, there was also an increasing medical-
ization of such behaviour, with female crime in particular linked to hysteria. See Ruth Harris,
Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law and Society in the Fin de Siècle (Oxford, 1989).

played out in politics and the media, revealed much about both gender politics
and the dynamics between national and regional identity. The decline of
honour in post-war Italy therefore provides valuable insight into the connec-
tions between emotions and social context, particularly during a period of
rapid change.
Historians of the emotions have come up with several ways of making
sense of the social and collective life of emotions, conceptualizing emotional
‘regimes’, ‘communities’, and ‘styles’ in history.⁴⁷ While Reddy’s expression
‘emotional regimes’ is rather rigid and schematic, Rosenwein’s ‘emotional
communities’ as ‘social communities’ who share ‘systems of feeling’ seems
more appropriate here.⁴⁸ Conceptualized in the plural, people might belong
to multiple ‘emotional communities’ and move between them, moving for
example between the public worlds of work, school, or university and the
intimate spaces of the home. While Rosenwein coined the term for the
medieval world, it also seems particularly suited to a democratic and pluralist
society. Italy in the 1950s was rapidly becoming such a place; with the rise of
migration and the mass media, Italians had to negotiate different influences
throughout their day-to-day lives. For a young Italian coming of age in the late
1950s and moving between the sphere of home and family, the weekly ritual of
Sunday mass, and peer gatherings at the beach or the piazza, the idea of
slipping between or negotiating different overlapping ‘emotional communi-
ties’, each with its own shared values, interests, and emotional styles, seems
particularly apt.
We will also see how religion and politics could create their own ‘emotional
communities’, with different values and attitudes to those of mainstream
society. Benno Gammerl’s idea of ‘emotional style’ is useful in encouraging
us to pay attention to how space and place shape how we experience and
express emotions, with different displays of emotion considered appropriate to
the home, the courtroom, the workplace, or the piazza.⁴⁹ Moving beyond
the obvious contrast between the intimate world of home and the public
spaces of work and leisure, the economic miracle was also creating new spaces
of intimacy and leisure, such as the beach and the car, which according to
many sources seemed almost to suggest or permit new behaviour. While the
principal focus of this book is on the intimate sphere, Chapters 3 and 4 will
also make some suggestions regarding how we might relate ‘emotional com-
munity’ to the nation and indeed to national identity. In the exploration of
⁴⁷ On ‘emotional regimes’, see Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling; Plamper, ‘The History of the
Emotions’, pp. 242–5. On ‘emotional communities’, see Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying About
Emotions in History’, American Historical Review, 107:3 (2002), pp. 821–45 and on emotional
styles, see Benno Gammerl, ‘Emotional Styles: Concepts and Challenges’, Rethinking History:
Special Issue on Emotional Styles, 16:2 (2012), pp. 161–75.
⁴⁸ Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, p. 842.
⁴⁹ Benno Gammerl, ‘Emotional Styles: Concepts and Challenges’.
Introduction 17
jealousy we see how an emotion could give shape and expression to anxieties
about gender relations and social change in these years. In this way we might
consider the history of the emotions not just as a method for the historian to
access private experiences and attitudes but recognize that emotions could
sometimes themselves be a crucial element of social and cultural change.
There is certainly no doubt that they were key to public conversations about
progress, modernity, and nation.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
Chapter 1 will explore how young Italians met and chose their marriage
partners, drawing primarily on the evidence from diaries and memoirs. One
of the key themes of this chapter is how and why men and women remem-
bered courtship, love, and marriage differently. Men tended to describe strong,
open, and definite feelings of love in courtship, while women were much more
likely to recount doubt, hesitation, ambivalence, or indifference. Reaching
adulthood in post-war Italy had very different meanings for men and
women, with men typically leaving home for military service and migration
while women were more likely to remain with their families until their
wedding. Love, marriage, home, and family thus had different meanings in
their lives. While arranged marriages were becoming less common in these
decades, the strong role played by family in courtship meant that it was often
difficult to distinguish an arranged marriage from one that was not. With the
rise of mass culture, men and women also began to measure their own
experiences against romantic ideals, often to see them falling short. Experience
of illness and disability marked many courtships, especially in the late 1940s
and early 1950s, when malaria, tuberculosis, and pneumonia were common.
In some cases this proved to be a barrier to marriage, although attitudes were
beginning to change in the late 1950s. Class was also crucial in determining
suitability, although it was undoubtedly family that was the ultimate arbiter.
Chapter 2 explores intimacy and sexuality in courtship. The ordinary
experiences of the diaries and memoirs are set against the (somewhat) differ-
ing codes of morality dictated by the Catholic Church, the PCI, and mass
culture, so that we can see how people often measured their choices and
experiences against their ideas of how a model man or woman should behave.
We will also see how the rituals, rules, and surveillance common in upper- and
middle-class courtships in the 1950s often left little room for intimacy.
Meanwhile, the piazza, a common site of courtship in most towns and cities,
was all too often about display rather than real communication. By the late
1950s, the economic boom was beginning to open up new spaces of leisure and
intimacy for young Italians, particularly the beach and the car. As couples

began to spend more time out of the home together, courtship was becoming
both more public and more private, with these new spaces providing more
space for intimacy and sexuality, as well as for shared leisure and communi-
cation between the sexes.
Chapter 3 is an exploration of southern customs of love, courtship, and
marriage. The notion of honour, strong in the southern regions and particu-
larly in Sicily and Calabria at least up to the late 1960s, strongly shaped
courtship and marriage. Since family honour was measured by the sexual
purity of unmarried daughters, young women’s lives were often tightly con-
trolled. Honour crime, elopement, and kidnap marriage were the outward and
most extreme signs of these customs and attitudes. In exploring these themes,
the second part of the chapter moves away from the diary and memoirs
because of the difficulty in finding sources that both write openly about such
experiences, and are willing to be published. Film was a medium that was
increasingly used to draw attention to such customs, although crime reportage
and the courtroom are the real arena of this chapter. The well-known but
seldom explored case of Franca Viola forms the core of the chapter’s second
part. Kidnapped in 1965 with the aim of forcing her into marriage, Franca
Viola was the first Sicilian woman to refuse to marry her kidnapper and by
implication to have him prosecuted. The trial of Filippo Melodia and his
accomplices in 1966 saw competing definitions of love and honour on trial
in the Sicilian courtroom, each connected to different ideas of what it meant to
be Italian, Sicilian, and modern. Although the trial was a great public victory
for Sicilian women, with Melodia found guilty and sentenced to prison, a closer
look at the sources suggests that, in private, attitudes were slower to change.
While honour was never directly named in the diaries and memoirs, men
and women often spoke of jealousy. Chapter 4 explores how the behaviour and
attitudes associated with honour were made more acceptable in the late
twentieth century by being repackaged in the emotional language of jealousy,
as couples increasingly married for love rather than family reasons. When we
widen the lens to look for jealousy rather than honour, we see that in contrast
to the media picture, the masculine controlling behaviour associated with
jealousy and honour was widespread everywhere in Italy and not just in the
south. Indeed, when we turn to the mass media—magazines and film in
particular—we get the impression of what might be termed a jealousy epi-
demic in Italy. This chapter uses a diverse range of sources—from films,
magazines, and crime reportage to diaries and memoirs—to trace how people
thought about jealousy and how they experienced it in these years. We will see
how it was often represented as illness or madness and could also be experi-
enced as such. Indeed, much more than love, jealousy was likely to be
described as an intense bodily experience. It was also something that many
Italians were keen to distance themselves from and to combat, whether in
society at large or in themselves.
Introduction 19
Chapter 5 charts experiences of marriage breakdown and attitudes towards
separation from the late 1940s to the 1970s. Although divorce was not legal
until 1970, legal separations were permitted. This chapter thus makes use of
evidence from a case study of legal separations in late 1940s and 1950s Turin
and from a smaller sample of diaries and memoirs which provide a broader
geographical picture. While many of these writers separated in the 1970s,
1980s, and later, this chapter argues that the roots of breakdown can often be
found in the economic miracle years, when the growing media focus on
romantic love often did not match up to the reality of married life. Just as
women were more likely to be ambivalent about their wedding, they were
much more likely than men to ask for a separation or divorce. What we see
also in these years is perhaps not simply greater dissatisfaction in marriage,
but new languages to comprehend and give shape to it. The idea of marriage
for love was key to the divorce campaigns, although the reality was that it was
still very difficult for a woman to leave her marriage even up to the 1970s.
While we see alternative narratives about love, marriage, and commitment
developing from the unofficial culture around the post-war PCI to 1968, this
chapter shows how work and feminism often gave women the tools they
needed to leave their marriages.
At the heart of the book are intimate experiences and ordinary lives. The
evidence amassed, especially in Chapters 3–5, also tells us a little and perhaps
even a lot about how Italians were coming to view themselves as a nation. By
the 1960s, Italy had cast off the shadow of fascism and begun to project itself as
a self-confident, modern country. The Conclusion offers some thoughts on
how love, honour, and jealousy were not just personal experiences but part of
the national stories that Italians told about themselves, in the effort to forge a
modern identity to suit the new Italy of the economic miracle. On the surface
the national story was a simple one, connecting the abandonment of honour to
the freedom to marry for love and to modernity in general, a quality which
would trickle down from the north and the cities to envelop the rural south.
A closer look at the connection between love and jealousy reveals the com-
plexities and contradictions in this process, and exposes the regional preju-
dices implicit in this national story about Italy’s path to modernity, this elusive
quality which so gripped the public mind in the post-war decades.
‘Who to Choose?’ Finding a Suitable

Marriage Partner
I am being fought over by two young men, one 24 years old (and a
goldsmith) and the other 22 [ . . . ]. The 24 year old is a nice looking
boy, and very much in love with me, the other is a labourer and often
doesn’t even have the price of a cinema ticket. But we love each other very
much and couldn’t live without seeing each other. What should I do?
Who to choose?¹
This pressing dilemma was described in a letter to ‘Francis’, the agony aunt of
Grand Hotel magazine, in July 1955. The gently mocking response was ‘the
labourer, naturally . . . or do you want to choose the goldsmith and die?’ What
is curious though is that while choosing love over financial security seemed
like the obvious choice to Francis as it likely does to the twenty-first-century
reader, it was by no means so obvious or clear-cut to the anonymous female
reader. For a young woman, particularly in rural and provincial Italy prior to
the onset of the economic boom, marriage was far too important a decision
to be put down to love alone. This chapter is an exploration of how men and
women coming of age between the 1950s and the 1970s met and married
their partners. Popular culture in the 1950s and 1960s was saturated with
romance, from the illustrated fotoromanzo (photoromance) magazines like
Grand Hotel and Sogno to the romantic comedies of Dino Comencini and
Dino Risi in the cinema. The ideal of the companionate marriage, with its
emphasis on companionship, care, and respect, was becoming more accepted
in the post-war world. At the same time, although it was changing by the
1960s, marriage was still largely understood as being about beginning a new
household and a family, and as such was inevitably shaped by practical and
financial considerations as well as by family obligations and pressures. Despite
the music they listened to and the films they watched, most young Italians
were aware that they needed a lot more than love to make a marriage work.
¹ ‘A.C.T’, letter to Grand Hotel, 23 July 1955.

Finding a Suitable Marriage Partner 21

At the same time, as mass culture became increasingly influential in the 1960s,
with rising incomes and consumer spending transforming lifestyles, the
disjuncture between romantic ideas and the often mundane reality of how
marriages were made was noted in memoirs, particularly those of women. In a
world where it was not broadly accepted for women to work outside the
household except out of real financial necessity, marriage was not just about
romance but about a future home, family, and as a housewife even a ‘career’ of
sorts. In contrast to popular assumptions both then and in the twenty-first
century, it was the men who could afford to be the true romantics, and these
gendered differences will be a key focus of this chapter.
At the same time the above letter, with its light-hearted yet dramatic tone,
probably misrepresents how most Italians thought about love and experienced
courtship and marriage. For many couples, love and pragmatism were not at
all in opposition; those of similar backgrounds were likely to meet and court,
while family approval might even prompt deeper feelings. For most it was not
a case of having to choose between feelings and financial security, but of love
itself being shaped by the considerations of the wider world that couples
inhabited. Many would have experienced no obvious dilemma about whether
or not to ‘choose love’ in marriage, but it is through the detailed picture of
courtship and marriage preparation built up in the memoirs that we can see
calculations and hesitations informing the complex web of feelings described.
The language used to describe love itself was indeed shaped by gender, class,
and regional tradition, while decisions about marriage were coloured by the
concerns of family, local custom, class, wealth, and health.
In addition, a new marriage was not just about the couple’s own feelings. It
was a public and social event, involving a wedding celebration as well as the
setting up of a new household. The couple’s families were usually involved and
numerous details, large and small, had to be negotiated and agreed upon.
There was often the exchange of a dowry or trousseau, while a new home had
to be furnished. An exploration of how couples and their families dealt with
and agreed on all of these practical details reveals much about how Italians
viewed marriage and family, and how customs and attitudes changed over
time. In the midst of so many practical and ritual considerations, the wedding
day itself did not always receive much attention in the memoirs and diaries. In
the late 1940s and 1950s, and for longer outside the major cities, weddings
were usually simple affairs with few guests, and brides were more likely to wear
a skirt suit or a simple, colourful dress than to wear a purpose-made white
‘wedding dress’. Although women’s magazines, from Grand Hotel to Famiglia
Cristiana, carried countless images of the elaborate, white wedding dress that
was becoming the ideal in the US and Western Europe, the reality was that
most could not have afforded a dress made to be worn on only one occasion.
Indeed, the emphasis in many accounts was not so much on the wedding day
as on the practical and emotional work of setting up a new household.

Given the emphasis placed on a wedding marking the foundation of a new
household and family, there were also some situations when love was not
considered enough to sustain an ‘unsuitable’ courtship. In the late 1940s and
1950s, illness and disability were often considered obstacles to marriage and
carried great shame and anxiety for those who considered themselves affected.
This was beginning to change by the late 1950s and 1960s as the war became
more distant and nutrition improved, although in some regions the stigma of
disability was slower to disappear. Even when not an insurmountable obstacle
to marriage, serious illness and convalescence were experiences that often
shaped relationships in the 1950s and had to be negotiated by the young
couple. While family seemed to dominate how young Italians made their
choices, broader considerations of class, background, and wealth were import-
ant. The ways in which Italians dealt with these obstacles also reveal specific
regional patterns. Underpinning all of these factors though are the very
different ways in which men and women approached courtship and marriage,
and it is to the question of gender that the chapter first turns.
MASCULINITY, COMING OF AGE, AND EMOTION
Writing about their experiences of youth, coming of age, courtship, and

marriage, Italian men and women had strikingly different ways of describing
how they met and married their partners. While not all men who wrote their
memoirs chose to mention marriage, those who did tended to devote ample
space to describing both the first meeting with their future wife and the
courtship. Declarations of love were frequent, open, and definite in the pages
of these memoirs. Walter Ferrarini’s simple statement that ‘one day I met love,
real love’, was typical. Born in Modena in 1929, Walter married in 1959.²
According to his memoir, he met his wife one day while helping to build a
new family home. ‘One Sunday, I found a girl at my side, she started to help
me with my work.—Why are you here? Today is a holiday, you are young, why
don’t you go dancing? She answered me with a smile—I want to be with you!
And so after a year or thereabouts we married.’ In Walter’s narrative, and in
his memory, love was instantly recognizable and the path to marriage easy
² For example Lido Testi (Arezzo, 1939) wrote of his first impressions of his wife that
‘I confess that she gave me sleepless nights’ and ‘it seemed like the woman had bewitched me,
she disrupted my ordinary life so much’: ‘Una vita tutta sbagliata’, MP/02, ADN. Mario Bertini
(Florence, 1933) wrote the following, about meeting his future wife: ‘And so it was that 1956
arrived, I was 23 and I finally met Her: a pronoun that I write with a capital “l” not as a typing
error but as a prelude to the most important name of my life.’ Of their first meeting, he wrote
‘a real love had sprouted, but what am I saying, the love!’: ‘Oltre la fame “diario d’una vita in
quattro stagioni” ’, MP/02, ADN.
Finding a Suitable Marriage Partner 23

and natural. Women’s memoirs tended to be more reticent in their admissions
of love, emphasizing instead ambivalence, hesitation, indifference, and some-
times even anxiety and fear in their accounts of courtship and the lead up to the
wedding, even when the marriage itself was happy. In contrast to the open and
definite statements of many men’s memoirs, reading the women’s texts often
necessitated interpreting gaps, silences, and digressions. Men and women
clearly both remembered and constructed very different narratives of love,
courtship, and marriage. This chapter explores the reasons why this was so,
uncovering the roots of these gendered narratives in both the sharply differing
experiences of coming of age in post-war Italy and the ways in which society, the
media, and popular culture represented love and marriage.
Italian men are not unique in describing stronger and more definite feelings
of love in courtship; Claire Langhamer noted similar disparities between men’s
and women’s accounts of courtship in her work on twentieth-century Britain,
as did Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher in their oral histories of English couples
who married before the 1960s.³ These strongly gendered patterns are worthy
of attention. It seems particularly noteworthy that the men’s narratives of
courtship are filled with much stronger declarations of love, when the vast
majority of popular romantic fiction and advice literature of the time was
directed at women. Curiously, a survey conducted by Catholic sociologists on
young people between the ages of 15 and 25 living in and around Milan in the
early 1960s drew quite different answers when asking young men and women
about their ideal partners.⁴ When asked about their future spouse and family,
both men and women said that they hoped to marry and have children.
The men described their ideal future wife in terms of moral and practical
qualities—someone who would be a good wife and mother—and made little
mention of either romantic love or physical attraction. The women in contrast
generally thought about their ideal relationship in terms of emotions and
romantic love; a model much more in keeping with the post-war narrative of
the rise of the companionate marriage. The girls were also much more positive
about the idea of relationships developing through companionship and mixed
gender friendships than were the boys. While we should be cautious about
taking such a survey at face value, it is still worth noting that when young
people were asked about their aspirations rather than experiences, the gender
disparities seemed to be reversed. Women’s ideals seemed likely not to match
up to the reality of their courtship experiences, while in the case of the men,
they became much more romantic when remembering real experiences.
³ Claire Langhamer, ‘Love and Courtship in Mid-twentieth Century England’, Historical

Journal, 50:1 (2007), pp. 173–96; Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual
Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918–1963 (Cambridge, 2010).
⁴ Guido Baglioni, I giovani nella societa industriale: Ricerca sociologica condotta in una zona
dell’Italia del nord (Milan, 1962), pp. 93–132.
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European War. Their Anglia Irridenta lay in the football fields and
factories, the music-halls and seaside excursions that they talked of,
and now hoped to see once again. Their Alsace Lorraine lay in the
skilled occupations or soft jobs that women or neutrals had invaded.
When he listened to their talk in billets, and occasionally caught
some real glimpse of them, between their mouth-organ concerts, and
their everlasting gamble at cards, it was of the keen Trades Unionists
who were already talking of purging this, that or the other skilled
industry from all the non-union elements that had been allowed to
flow into it, behind their backs, while they were chasing Fritz across
this b—— country, where Belgium, France, or Luxembourg were
simply “billets,” and the goal was “dear old Blighty”—behind them,
over the Channel, not in front, still ringed about by German trenches.
There were elements of hesitation, he noticed, in all the Allies. The
French felt they had done much too much, and wanted to be back at
their farms and little shops. The Belgians wanted to march into their
country without the tragic necessity of knocking flat all its solidly built,
hard-working little towns. All three nations shared the inevitable
sense that grew upon men with the passage of years, of the
mechanical nature of the War. Thus the cavalry, where the greatest
proportion of regular soldiers lingered, were still keen on exploiting
their one chance. The artillery, buoyed up by the facilities that their
command of transport gave them, fired away their now all abundant
ammunition. The machine gunners, containing some proportion of
picked men, and able to feel that they could easily produce some
noticeable effect with their weapon, were still game. But the mass of
infantry, tired enough of the bomb and the rifle, and probably unfitted
by generations of peace, for any effective use of the bayonet, were
rapidly adopting the attitude, unexpressed as always with the
humbler Englishman, of “Let the gunners go on if they like. We don’t
mind!”
On a grey November morning, Dormer went to his billet in the suburb
of a manufacturing town. It was the most English place he had set
eyes on in all his three years. It was not really suburban, very nearly,
not quite. There was no garden before the door, it was close to the
factories and workshops where the wealth that had built it was made,
instead of being removed a decent mile or so. In fact, it just lacked
the proper pretentiousness. Its owner had made money and was not
in the least ashamed of admitting it, was rather prone to display the
fact and his house looked like it. It was a villa, not a château. It was
the home of a successful manufacturer who did not want in the least
to be taken for a country gentleman. He, poor fellow, had been called
up and promptly killed, and his home, with its stained-glass windows,
expensive draping and papering, clumsy if efficient sanitation, was
inhabited only by his widow.
Dormer thought there could not be in the world any person so utterly
beaten. Broken-hearted, exposed during four years to considerable
bodily privation, being in the occupied area, she was no
Mademoiselle Vanderlynden of the Army zone that Dormer knew,
making a bold front against things. She was a delicate—had been
probably a pretty woman—but it was not from any of her half-audible
monosyllabic replies that Dormer was able to discover to what sort of
a country he had come. A little farther down the street was the
factory, long gutted by the Germans and used as a forage store,
where his company were billeted. The old caretaker in the time-
keeper’s cottage told Dormer all that was necessary, and left him
astonished at the moderation of tone and statement, compared with
the accounts of German occupation given by the Propagandist
Press. Possibly, it was because he addressed the old man in French
—or because he had never parted with his English middle-class
manners—or because the old fellow was nearly wild with delight at
being liberated. This was what Dormer heard:
“Enter, my Captain. It is a Captain, is it not, with three stars? The
insignia of Charles Martell!” (Here wife and daughter joined in the
laugh at what was obviously one of the best jokes in father’s
repertory.) “You will find that the Bosches removed everything, but
that makes less difficulty in the workshop. You have only to divide
the floor space between your men. I know. I was a corporal in the
War of ’Seventy. Ah! a bad business, that, but nothing to what we
have now supported. You will do well to make a recommendation to
your men not to drink the water of the cistern. The Bosches have
made beastliness therein. Ah! You have your own watercart? That is
well done, much better than we others used to have, in Algeria. It is
always wise to provide against the simple soldier, his thoughts have
no connection. You say you are accustomed to Germans and their
mannerisms? I do not wonder. We too, as you may judge, have had
cause to study them. I will tell you this, my Captain, the German is
no worse than any other man, but he has this mania for Deutschland
über Alles. It comes from having been a little people and weak, and
so often conquered by us others. So that to give him some idea of
himself, since he cannot invent a culture like us other French, he
must go to put all above below, and make a glory of having a worse
one. That shows itself in his three great faults—he has no sentiment
of private property—what is others’, is his. He must be dirtier than a
dog in his habits—witness our court-yard—and he has to make
himself more brute than he really is. You see, therefore, he has
stripped the factory, and even our little lodging, down to my
daughter’s sewing-machine, and the conjugal bed of mother and
myself. You see also, that we had our grandchildren, our dog Azor,
our cat Titi. Now many of the Bosches who lodged here were
certainly married and had their little ones and domestic animals. Yet
if they found a child or a beast playing in the entry when they entered
or left, they must give a kick of the foot, a cut with the riding-whip.
Not from bad thoughts, I assure you. It is in their code, as it is in that
of us others, English and French, to lift the hat, to make a salutation.
The officers are the worst, because in them the code is stronger. For
the German simple soldier, I have respect. They sang like angels!”
(Here the old man quavered out the first bars of:
“Ein feste Bourg ist unser Gott.”)
Dormer wanted to get away, but could scarcely forbear to listen
when the daughter broke in:
“But, Papa, recount to the officer the droll trick you played upon
those who came to demolish the factory!”
“Ah, yes. Place yourself upon a chair, my officer, and I will tell you
that. Figure to yourself that these Bosches, as I have explained,
were not so bad as one says in the papers. They had orders to do it.
I know what it is. I have had orders, in Algeria, to shoot Arabs. It was
not my dream, but I did it. I will explain to you this.
“It was the day on which they lost the ridge. One heard the English
guns, nearer and nearer. Already there were no troops in the factory,
nothing but machine gunners, always retreating. A party of three
came here with machinery in a box. One knew them slightly, since
they also had billeted here. They were not dirty types; on the
contrary, honest people. Sapper-miners, they were; but this time one
saw well that they had something they did not wish to say. They
deposit their box and proceed to render account of the place. They
spoke low, and since we have found it better to avoid all appearance
of wishing to know their affairs, we did not follow them. Only, my
daughter had a presentiment. Woman, you know, my officer, it is
sometimes very subtle. She put it in her head that these would blow
up the factory. She was so sure that I lifted the cover of their box and
looked in. It was an electric battery and some liquids in phials. I had
no time to lose. I placed myself at the gate and ran as fast as I can to
where they were, in the big workshop. I am already aged more than
sixty. My days for the race are over. Given also that I was
experiencing terrible sentiments—for you see, while we keep the
factory there is some hope we may be able to work when the War is
finished, but if it is blown up, what shall we others go and do—I was
all in a palpitation, by the time I reached them. I cried: ‘There they
go!’
“‘Who goes?’ they asked.
“‘The cavalry,’ I cried.
“They ran to the entry, and seeing no one, they feared that they were
already surrounded. I saw them serpentine themselves from one
doorway to another all down the street. The moment they were lost
to sight I flung their box into the big sewer!”
Dormer billeted his company in the factory. He did not fear shell-fire
that night. He himself slept in a bed at the villa. It was the first time
he had left the night guard to a junior officer. In the morning, he
paraded his company, and proceeded, according to plan, to await
the order to move. The days were long gone by when a battalion
was a recognizable entity, with a Mess at which all the officers saw
each other once a day. Depleted to form Machine Gun Companies,
the truncated battalions of the end of the War usually worked by
separate companies, moving independently. There was some
desultory firing in front, but his own posts had seen and heard
nothing of the enemy. About nine he sent a runner to see if his
orders had miscarried. Reply came, stand to, and await
developments. He let his men sit on the pavement, and himself
stood at the head of the column, talking with the two youngsters who
commanded platoons under him. Nothing happened. He let the men
smoke. At last came the order: “Cease fire.”
When he read out the pink slip to his subordinates, they almost
groaned. Late products of the at last up-to-date O.T.C.’s of England,
they had only been out a few months and although they had seen
shell-fire and heavy casualties, yet there had always been a
retreating enemy, and fresh ground won every week. The endless-
seeming years of Trench Warfare they had missed entirely. The slow
attrition that left one alone, with all one’s friends wounded or killed,
dispersed to distant commands or remote jobs, meant nothing to
them. They had been schoolboys when Paschendaele was being
contested, Cadets when the Germans burst through the Fifth Army.
They wanted a victorious march to Berlin.
Dormer read the message out to the company. The men received the
news with ironical silence. He had the guards changed, and the
parade dismissed, but confined to billets. He heard one of his
N.C.O.’s say to another: “Cease fire! We’ve got the same amount of
stuff on us as we had two days ago!”
It made him thoughtful. Ought he to crime the chap? Why should he?
Had the Armistice come just in time? If it hadn’t come, would he have
been faced with the spectacle of two armies making peace by
themselves, without orders, against orders, sections and platoons
and companies simply not reloading their rifles, machine gunners
and Trench Mortars not unpacking their gear, finally even the artillery
keeping teams by the guns, and the inertia gradually spreading
upwards, until the few at the top who really wanted to go on, would
have found the dead weight of unwillingness impossible to drag?
The prospect, though curious, was not alarming. In a country so
denuded and starved, one could keep discipline by the simple
expedient of withholding rations. He had already seen, a year before
at Étaples, the leaderless plight of all those millions of armed men,
once they were unofficered. He was not stampeded by panic, and
his inherited, inbred honesty bade him ask himself: “Why shouldn’t
they make Peace themselves?” The object that had drawn all these
men together was achieved. The invasion of France was at an end,
that of Belgium a matter of evacuation only. “Cease fire.” It almost
began to look like an attempt to save face. Was it the same on the
German side too?
In the afternoon he proposed to walk over to Battalion H.Q. and have
a word with the Colonel. He knew quite well he should find the other
company commanders there. Naturally every one would want to get
some idea of what was to be expected under these totally
unprecedented circumstances. He was met at the door of his billet
by a message from the youngster he had left in charge. He had got a
hundred and forty prisoners.
Dormer went at once. He could see it all before he got there. All
along the opposite side of the street, faultlessly aligned and properly
“at ease” were men in field grey. At either end of the line stood a
guard of his own company, and not all Dormer’s pride in the men he
had led with very fair success, with whose training and appearance
he had taken great pains, could prevent his admitting to himself that
the only point at which his lot could claim superiority was in a sort of
grumpy humour. The machinery of War had conquered them less
entirely than it had conquered the Germans.
In the little time-keeper’s box, turned into the company office, he
found a tall, good-looking man, who immediately addressed him in
perfect English, giving the rank of Feld Webel, the quantity and
regiment of his party and adding: “I surrender to you, sir.” Dormer
gave instructions that the party should be marched to Brigade Head-
quarters. He wanted to send some report as to the capture, but his
subordinate replied: “We didn’t capture ’em. They just marched up
the street. The post at the bridge let ’em through.” Dormer let it go at
that, and having seen the street cleared, he walked over to see his
Colonel, who was billeted in a big school in a public park. His story
was heard with that sort of amusement that goes with the last bottle
of whisky, and the doubt as to when any more will be obtainable. The
Adjutant said: “Simply gave ’emselves up, did they?”
But the Captain commanding C Company, a man of about Dormer’s
own sort and service, voiced Dormer’s thought.
“I believe, in another week, we’d have had both sides simply laying
down their arms.”
“Oh, nonsense, soon stop that!” The Colonel spoke without real
conviction. He had to say that officially.
With regard to the object for which he had come, Dormer found
every one in his own difficulty. No one knew what was to happen,
except that arrangements were already on foot for enormous
demobilization camps. But the immediate steps were not even
known at Brigade. Every one, of course, aired some pet idea, and
were interrupted by noise outside, shouts and cries, the sound of
marching, and orders given in German. The room emptied in a
moment. The park was at one end of the town, and abutted on the
smaller streets of artisans’ dwellings that, in every town of the sort,
goes by the name of Le Nouveau Monde. This quarter had
apparently emptied itself into the park, to the number of some
hundreds, mostly people of over military age, or children, but one
and all with those thin white faces that showed the long years of
insufficient and unsuitable food, and the spiritual oppression that lay
on “occupied” territory. They were shouting and shaking their fists
round the compact formation of Dormer’s prisoners, who had just
been halted, in front of the house. The N.C.O. in charge had been
ordered by Brigade to bring them back. A chit explained the matter:
“Prisoners taken after 11.0 a.m. to be sent back to their own units, on
the line of retreat.”
The Feld Webel enlightened the Colonel’s mystification: “We refuse
to obey the order, sir. Our regiment is twenty miles away. All the
peasants have arms concealed. We shall just be shot down.”
It was a dilemma. Dormer could not help thinking how much better
the Feld Webel showed up, than his own Colonel. The latter could
not shoot the men where they stood. Nor could he leave them to the
mercies of the natives. How difficult War became with the burden of
civilization clogging its heels. The first thing to do was obviously to
telephone to the A.P.M. for police. In the meantime a French Liaison
Officer made a speech, and Dormer grinned to hear him. Fancying
apologizing for the War. But what else could the fellow do. He did it
well, considering. The crowd quieted, thinned, dispersed. The police
arrived, and had a discussion with the Adjutant. Still no conclusion.
The Feld Webel strode up and down in front of his men, master of
the situation. At length, some one had an idea. Six lorries rolled up in
the dark, an interpreter was put on board, and the party moved off in
the November dusk. The Commander of C Company and Dormer
left H.Q. together. Parting at the corner that separated their scattered
companies, they both exclaimed together:
“What a War!” and burst out laughing.
It was perhaps, to a certain degree, Dormer’s fault, that during the

remainder of November he became conscious of a dreary sense of
anti-climax. No doubt he was that sort of person. The emergencies
of the War had considerably overstrained his normal powers, which
he had forced to meet the need. The need had ceased, and he had
great difficulty in goading himself up to doing the bare necessary
routine of Company office parades. He managed to avoid being sent
up to the Rhine, and even secured a reasonable priority in
demobilization, but beyond this there was nothing for it but to
“continue the motion” of waiting for the next thing to happen.
His principal job was to extract from an unwilling peasantry, enough
ground for football. How often did he go to this farm and that village
shop, with his best manner, his most indirect approach, liberal orders
for any of the many commodities that could be bought, and in the
last resort, cheerful payment of ready money out of his own pocket in
order to obtain a grudging leave to use this or that unsuitable
meadow, not to the extent that the game of football demanded, but to
the extent that the small proprietors considered to be the least they
could make him accept for the most money that he could possibly be
made to pay.
Then, in the long dark evenings, there was the job of keeping the
men away from the worse sorts of estaminet. His own abilities,
limited to singing correctly the baritone part of Mendelssohn’s
Sacred Works, or Sullivan’s humorous ones, was not of any practical
service. What was wanted was the real star comic, the red-nosed
man with improbable umbrella, the stage clergyman with his stage
double-life and voice that recalled with such unintentional
faithfulness, the affected mock-culture of the closed and stereotyped
mind. Any deformity was welcome, not, Dormer observed, that they
wanted to laugh at the helplessness of the bandy leg or the stutterer,
the dwarf or the feeble-minded. On the contrary, the sentimentality of
the poorer English had never stood out in brighter relief than on the
edge of those devastated battlefields, where in their useless khaki,
the men who had perpetuated the social system that had so blindly
and wantonly used so many of them, waited patiently enough for the
order of release from the servitude that few of them had chosen or
any of them deserved. No, they liked to see the cunning and
prowess of the old lady, or the innocent boy, applauded the way in
which all those characters portrayed as having been born with less
than normal capabilities showed more than normal acquisitiveness
or perspicacity.
Dormer could not help reflecting how different they were from the
New Army in which he had enlisted. In the squad of which, at the
end of three months’ violent training and keenly contested
examinations, he had become the Corporal, there had been one or
two labourers, several clerks from the humbler warehouses and
railways, others in ascending scale from Insurance Offices and
Banks, one gorgeous individual who signed himself a Civil Servant,
three persons of private means, who drove up to the parade ground
in motor-cars. He well remembered one of these latter going
surreptitiously to the Colonel and applying for a commission, and
being indignantly refused, on the grounds that the Colonel didn’t
know who (socially) he (the applicant) was. But when the news got
out, the section were even more disrespectful to that unfortunate
individual because they considered he had committed a breach of
some sort of unwritten code that they had undertaken to observe. So
they went on together, the immense disparity of taste and outlook
cloaked by shoddy blue uniforms and dummy rifles, equal rations
and common fatigues.
But the first offensive of the spring of 1915 had brought new
conditions. The loss in infantry officers had been nothing short of
catastrophic. Very soon hints, and then public recommendation to
take commissions reached them. The section meanwhile had
altered. Two of the more skilled labourers had got themselves “asked
for” by munition works. Of the remainder Dormer and four others
applied and got commissions. He could see nothing like it now.
There was more of a mix-up than ever. For some men had been
exempted from the earlier “combings out” of the unenlisted for skill,
and others for ill-health. There was now only one really common
bond, the imperative necessity to forget the War and all that had to
do with it. This was the general impetus that had replaced the
volunteering spirit, and it was this that Dormer had to contend with.
He mastered the business of amusing the men pretty well, and his
subordinates helped him. A more serious difficulty was with the
skilled mechanics. Fortunately, an infantry battalion demanded little
skill, and except for a few miners who had been out no time at all,
and were at present making no fuss, there was plenty of grumbling
but no organized obstruction.
He found a more advanced state of affairs when he went at the
appointed time, to supervise a football match between a team
representing his own Brigade and that of a neighbouring Brigade of
Heavy Artillery. Crossing the Grand’ Place of the village to call on the
Gunner Mess he found a khaki crowd, but it took him some minutes
to realize that a full-dress protest meeting was in progress. Senior
N.C.O.’s were mounted upon a G.S. wagon. These, he gathered,
were the Chairman and speakers. Another soldier, whose rank he
could not see, was addressing the meeting. More shocked than he
had ever been in his life, he hastily circled the square, and got to the
Mess. He found most of the officers in; there was silence, they were
all reading and writing. After the usual politenesses came a pause.
He felt obliged to mention the object of his visit. Silence again.
Eventually the Captain with whom he had arranged the preliminaries
of the match said rather reluctantly:
“I’m afraid we shan’t be able to meet you this afternoon.”
Dormer forebore to ask the reason, but not knowing what else to do,
rose and prepared to take his leave. Possibly he spoke brusquely, he
was nervous in the atmosphere of constraint, but whatever may have
prompted the Gunner Captain, what he said was a confession:
“Our fellows are airing their views about demob.”
“Really!”
“Yes, perhaps you noticed it, as you came along?”
“Well, I did see a bit of a crowd.”
“You didn’t hear the speeches?” The other smiled.
“I heard nothing definitely objectionable, but it’s rather out of order,
isn’t it?”
“Well, I suppose so, but we get no help from up-atop!” The Captain
nodded in the direction of the Local Command.
“No, I suppose not,” Dormer sympathized.
The young Colonel interposed. “It’s very difficult to deal with the
matter. There’s a high percentage of skilled men in our formation.
They want to be getting back to their jobs.”
“It’s really rather natural,” agreed the Captain.
Dormer tried to help him. “We all do, don’t we?”
There was a sympathetic murmur in the Mess which evidently
displeased the Colonel.
“I’m not accustomed to all this going home after the battle. Time-
expired men I understand, but the New Army enlistments——” He
left it at that, and Dormer felt for him, probably, with the exception of
a few servants and N.C.O.’s, the only pre-War soldier in the Mess,
uncertain of himself and trying not to see the ill-suppressed
sympathy if not envy with which most of the officers around him
regarded the affair.
“Awfully sorry, Dormer,” the Captain concluded, “we simply can’t get
our crowd together. You see how it is. When this has blown over I’ll
come across and see you, and we will fix something up.”
Dormer went.
The Gunner Captain came that evening. In Dormer’s smaller Mess, it
needed only a hint to the youngsters to clear out for a few minutes.
Dormer admired the good humour with which the other approached
him. It was obviously the only thing to do.
Over drinks he asked, modelling himself on the other’s attitude:
“So that business blew over, did it?”
“It did, thank goodness. Awfully decent of you to take it as you did. I
hated letting you down.”
“Don’t mention it. I saw how you were placed.”
“The Colonel very much appreciated the way you spoke. I hope you
had no trouble with your chaps?”
“They were all right. I pitched them a yarn. They didn’t believe it, of
course. Some of them were at the—er——”
“The bloomin’ Parliament. Don’t mind saying it. It’s a dreadful shock
to a regular like our old man.”
“Naturally.”
“He spoke the plain unvarnished truth when he said he was unused
to all this demobbing.”
“Well, well, you can comfort him, I suppose, by pointing out that it
isn’t likely to occur again.”
“He’s a good old tough ’un. Splendid man in action, that’s what
makes one so sorry about it. Otherwise, of course, one knows what
the men mean. It’s only natural.”
“Perfectly.”
“His trouble is not only the newness of it. It’s his utter helplessness.”
“Quite so. Absolutely nothing to be done. The—er—meeting was as
orderly as possible. I walked right through it. They simply ignored
me.”
“Oh yes, there’s no personal feeling. They all paraded this morning
complete and regular.”
“That’s the end of it, I hope.”
“I think so. They came up to the Mess—three N.C.O.’s—a
deputation, if you please. They brought a copy of the resolution that
was passed.”
Neither could keep a straight face, but laughter did not matter
because it was simultaneous. The Captain went on, finishing his
drink:
“I believe the old man had a momentary feeling that he ought to
crime some one—but our Adjutant—topping chap—met them in the
passage and gave them a soft answer, and cooked up some sort of
report, and sent it up. It pacified ’em.”
“Did they need it?”
“Not really. ’Pon me word, never saw anything more reasonable in
my life, than what they had written out. It’s too bad, hanging ’em up
for months and months, while other people get their jobs. They know
what they want so much better than anyone else.”
“It’s impossible to please every one.”
“Yes. But when you think of what the men have done.”
Dormer did not reply. He was thinking of the Infantry, with their whole
possessions on their backs, always in front in the advance, last in
the retreat. The Gunner took his leave. Like everything else, either
because of the incident, or more probably without any relation to it,
the slow but steady progress of demobilization went on, those men
who had the more real grievance, or the greater power of
expression, got drafted off. The composition of units was always
changing. Even where it did not, what could “other ranks” do? To the
last Dormer felt his recurrent nightmare of the Headless Man to be
the last word on the subject. But it was becoming fainter and fainter
as the violence of the first impression dimmed, keeping pace with the
actuality of the dispersal of that khaki nation that lay spread across
France, Germany, Italy, the Balkans, and the East. The Headless
Man was fading out.
It was mid-April, the first fine weather of the year, when his own turn
came. Of course the Mess gave him a little dinner, for although
nothing on earth, not even four years of War, could make him a
soldier, his length of service, varied experience, and neat adaptability
had made him invaluable; again no one had ever found it possible to
quarrel with him; further, his preoccupation with games had made
him perhaps the most sought-for person in the Brigade.
Had it not been for these reasons, there was little else to which he
had a farewell to say; casualty, change, and now demobilization
removed friends, then chance acquaintances, until there was no one
with whom he was in the slightest degree intimate. He might almost
have been some attached officer staying in the Mess, instead of its
President, for all he knew of the officers composing it. There was
nothing in the village that lay on the edge of the battlefield that he
wanted to see again. It was not a place where he had trained or
fought, it was not even the place at which the news of the Armistice
had reached him. It was just a place where the Brigade of which his
battalion had formed a part had been dumped, so as to be out of the
way, but sufficiently within reach of rail, for the gradual attrition of
demobilization to work smoothly. An unkind person might have
wondered if the mild festival that took place in the estaminet of that
obscure commune was not so much a farewell dinner to old Dormer,
as an eagerly sought opportunity for a little extra food and drink that
might help to pass the empty days. Slightly bleary-eyed in the
morning, Dormer boarded the train, waved his hand to the little group
of officers on the platform, and sat down to smoke until he might
arrive at Dunkirk.
On a mild April evening, he paced the port side of the deck of the
steamer that was taking him home. He was aware that he might
have to spend a night in dispersal station, but it did not matter in the
least. The real end of the business to such an essential Englishman
as Dormer was here and now, watching the calm leaden sea-space
widen between him and the pier-head of Calais. Prophets might talk
about the obliteration of England’s island defences, but the
sentiment that the Channel evoked was untouched. After years of
effort and sacrifice, Dormer remained a stranger in France. He might
know parts of it tolerably well, speak its language fairly, fight beside
its soldiers, could feel a good deal of intelligent admiration for its
people and institutions, but nothing would ever make him French. It
would perhaps have been easier to assimilate him into Germany. But
on the whole, in spite of his unprovocative manner, he was difficult to
assimilate, a marked national type. Lengthier developments and
slower, more permanent revolutions were in his inherited mental
make-up, than in that of any of the other belligerents. In a Europe
where such thrones as were left were tottering and crashing, nothing
violent was in his mind, or in the minds of ninety per cent of those
men who covered the lower deck, singing together, with precisely the
same lugubrious humour, as in the days of defeat, of stalemate, or of
victory:
“Old soldiers never die,
They only fade away.”
He turned to look at them, packed like sardines, so that even the sea
breeze could hardly dissipate the clouds of cigarette smoke, just as
no disaster and no triumph could alter their island characteristics,
however much talk there might be about town life sapping the race.
As he looked at them, herded and stalled like animals, but cheerful in
their queer way as no animal can ever be, he remembered that
somewhere among all those thousands that were being poured back
into England day by day (unless of course he were buried in one of
those graveyards that marked so clearly the hundred miles from
Ypres to St. Quentin) was a private soldier, whom he had been told
to discover and bring to justice for the Crime at Vanderlynden’s, as
Kavanagh had called it. He had never even got the fellow’s name
and number, and he did not care. He never wanted the job, nothing
but his punctilious New Army spirit, that had made him take the War
as seriously as if it had been business, had kept him at it. Now he
had done with it, the man would never be found. But in Dormer’s
mind would always remain that phantom that he had pursued for so
many months—years even, over all those miles, in and out of so
many units and formations. It had come to stand for all that mass
whose minds were as drab as their uniform, so inarticulate, so
decent and likable in their humility and good temper. Theirs was the
true Republicanism, and no written constitution could add anything to
it. He had not thought of that affair, during all these last months that
had seen so many Empires fall, so many nations set upon their feet,
but he thought of it now.
He turned once again and surveyed that coastline, somewhere
behind which he had made that pilgrimage; there it lay, newly freed
Belgium on the left, on the right the chalky downs that ran from Gris-
Nez far out of sight, down to Arras. Between the two, on those
marshes so like any of South-Eastern England, had taken place that
Crime at Vanderlynden’s, that typified the whole War. There, on
those flat valleys of the Yser and the Lys, the English army had
come to rest after its first few weeks of romantic march and counter-
march. There had the long struggle of endurance been the longest
and least spectacular. It was there that the English Effort, as they
called it, had played its real part, far more than on the greater
battlefields farther south, or away on other continents. The Crime at
Vanderlynden’s showed the whole thing in miniature. The English
had been welcomed as Allies, resented as intruders, but never had
they become homogeneous with the soil and its natives, nor could
they ever leave any lasting mark on the body or spirit of the place.
They were still incomprehensible to Vanderlynden’s, and
Vanderlynden’s to them. Dormer was of all men most unwilling and
perhaps unable to seek for ultimate results of the phenomena that
passed before his eyes. To him, at that moment, it seemed that the
English Effort was fading out, leaving nothing but graveyards. And
when he found this moving him, his horror of the expression of any
emotion asserted itself, and he elbowed his way down the
companion, to get a drink.
When he came up again, that low shore had passed out of sight, but
ahead was visible the moderately white cliffs of England, beyond
which lay his occupation and his home, his true mental environment,
and native aspiration. He experienced now in all its fullness the
feeling that had been with him with such tragic brevity from time to
time during those years. This last passage of the Channel was, this
time, real escape. The Crime at Vanderlynden’s was behind him. He
had got away from it at last.
Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and London
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Love, Honour, and

This book is for Patrick and Robin

I.1. Map of Italy 8

ADN Archivio Diaristico Nazionale (National Diary Archive)

Note on Sources and Translations

The day of my wedding even though I seemed happy. I was despairing

2 Love, Honour, and Jealousy

² Livia Colasanti, ‘Il sapore della cioccolata’, MP/10, ADN.

4 Love, Honour, and Jealousy

FROM POST-WAR RUIN TO PROSPERITY:

6 Love, Honour, and Jealousy

¹² Emanuela Scarpellini, Material Nation: A Consumer’s History of Italy (Oxford, 2011),

FIRST-PERSON WRITING: THE NARRATORS

8 Love, Honour, and Jealousy

10 Love, Honour, and Jealousy

FIRST-PERSON WRITING: NARRATIVE, MEMORY,

The analysis of such a set of personal testimonies, and particularly memoirs,

²⁴ Evans, Missing Persons, p. 12.

12 Love, Honour, and Jealousy

14 Love, Honour, and Jealousy

THINKING ABOUT E MOTIONS IN POST-WAR ITALY

Even in autobiographical writings dealing with personal, emotive topics, we can

16 Love, Honour, and Jealousy

18 Love, Honour, and Jealousy

‘Who to Choose?’ Finding a Suitable

¹ ‘A.C.T’, letter to Grand Hotel, 23 July 1955.

Finding a Suitable Marriage Partner 21

22 Love, Honour, and Jealousy

MASCULINITY, COMING OF AGE, AND EMOTION

Writing about their experiences of youth, coming of age, courtship, and

Finding a Suitable Marriage Partner 23

³ Claire Langhamer, ‘Love and Courtship in Mid-twentieth Century England’, Historical

It was perhaps, to a certain degree, Dormer’s fault, that during the

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