DIABOLICAL LOVE - PART ONE
date: 27 February 2010 at 16:29:06 - 0 comments
Do “evil” people exist?
Are they expressions of the culture from which they come?
Do their crimes help us understand the world in which they lived?
Every country has its ‘monsters.’ Some are better known than the greatest national heroes. Jack the Ripper, for example. You can admit to a fascination for Jack and his world without being taken for a madman. Indeed, it is amazing the way the English manage to preserve the story, dust it off, and give it new lustre whenever the myth begins to wane. Has any other country managed to create a science – “Ripperology” – by studying the crimes of a man (?) about whom practically nothing is known? Every year, new ideas and theories emerge. It’s a bit like Loch Ness, where occasional ‘sightings’ fuel a flourishing tourist industry which has evolved around a fairy story. Would anyone have heard of Loch Ness if it weren’t for the Monster of the Deep? Would we have such a marked impression of Victorian England without Jack the Ripper? London by night, the impenetrable fog, the carriages of the rich, a world of poverty and widespread prostitution, a killer roaming the city night after night in a black cloak and a top hat, a surgical bag in his hand.
It would be easy to persuade ourselves that the English had banded together to invent Jack the Ripper for no other reason than to create a market for the books, films, television series, documentaries and guided tours of Whitechapel which seem to be endless.
So, what has Italy to offer in the way of myths?
The Italian mafia has its own brand of fascination, above all in countries where the impact of mafia-type crime on daily life is not so readily felt. Coppola’s “Godfather” laid down the guidelines; the director’s roots are Sicilian, but his mentality is American. He has created a myth which owes little to facts. Matteo Garrone’s stupendous film of Roberto Saviano’s recent book, “Gomorra,” is too disturbingly real for easy consumption. Organised crime is frightening, while Jack the Ripper is, somehow, reassuring. We read of Jack and feel a comforting thrill of fear for an epoch which has long disappeared.
And yet, Jack ripped, carved, mutilated, wrote taunting messages in blood….
If we played the game of matching myths of horror, the Monster of Florence would certainly give Jack the Ripper a run for his money. All the ingredients are there: couples slaughtered while making love in the country; sexual ‘trophies’ carried off by the killer; crimes committed by the light of a full moon; a city in the grip of terror for almost twenty years; a killer who was merciless, intelligent, taunting, and utterly unstoppable. An expert gunman. An accomplished anatomist. Who might the killer be?
The police eventually came up with Pietro Pacciani. An illiterate brute, a farmer who had terrorised his wife and raped his daughter. A drunkard, and a peeping-tom. Even worse, the prosecution decided that Pacciani hadn’t acted alone. He was one of a band of “snack-bar” friends, including the local postman Mario Vanni (nicknamed “Torsolo” – Old Sleepy), and their drinking-and-peeping chums from local villages. There was nothing “fascinating” about these rural bumpkins. They might have been bit-players from Boorman’s “Deliverance.” Though Vanni and Pacciani were imprisoned for the ‘Monster’ murders, no-one in Italy is convinced by the sentences.
The Monster of Florence is still out there. Dead, perhaps. Maybe…
Does the story tell us anything of Italy, the way Jack the Ripper speaks to us of Victorian London? We learn little more than the fact that couples often made love in cars, and that the hills around Florence were full of people spying on them. Hardly worth a footnote. The official account reduces an alarming series of murders (16 young people died) by an expert marksman (shooting with unerring accuracy at night), a perverted ‘trophy-seeker,’ to one-too-many glasses of wine and slices of salami in the village bar.
Then again, the shootings, mutilations and vast quantities of innocent blood spilled by the Monster of Florence are too vivid, too recent, too brutal to constitute the stuff of myth. No normal person can comprehend the motives behind the murders. We want the killer to be identified, and locked in jail. By contrast, we are almost glad that Scotland Yard never managed to collar Jack the Ripper!
England 1 – Italy 0, the game is lost.
And yet, there is one Italian killer whose crimes were so peculiar that they still provoke horror whenever they are spoken of. A killer who shed blood and dismembered the victims to a greater extent than Jack the Ripper. A killer whose victims were harmless women. A killer who sheds bright light on a fascinating period of Italian history more vividly than any historical or sociological text could hope to do. A killer of inhuman ferocity. A killer so twisted and strange that the Brothers Grimm would have baulked about telling the tale. And the odd thing is that we cannot fail to feel compassion. Not just for the victims, but for the killer, too. Even stranger, in a country which has always favoured men for their strength and their savagery, this killer is a woman.
A mother who slaughtered other mothers.
A product of the Fascist era, when women were idolised as “angels by the fireside.”
Her name was Leonarda Cianciulli, though she is known as ‘The Soapmaker.’
This is where her story starts.
In the land of myth…
Photo: A film about the life and crimes of Leonarda Cianculli will be shown in Spoleto on 8th March. Director, Alessandro Quadretti, will be there to talk about his work.
