Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Franca Viola

Episode Date: December 4, 2024

One of the world’s unsung heroes – at least outside of Italy – is a brave woman who stood up to an insidious and longstanding custom and made her country a better place for it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is Tracy V. Wilson from Stuff You Missed in History Class. Do you like podcasts, music, and audiobooks? Because when you subscribe to Amazon Music Unlimited, you get all three in one app. Imagine listening to your favorite podcasts and music on the go to work, school, the gym, or better yet, vacation. Now, imagine being on vacation

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Hey and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh and Chuck's here and Jerry's here for Dave. So that makes this an official short stuff. That's right. And we're going to issue a trigger warning on this one. Part of the story has to do with sexual assault. So we just wanted to kind of let everyone know that that's coming. But ultimately, this is a story of courage and bravery.

Yeah. So if you go down to Sicily in southern Italy and ask them what a fuatina is, they will say, we don't really do that anymore, but we'll tell you what it is anyway. It means sudden escape. And in its most benign form, it was a way for couples who were consenting, they wanted to get married, but their families were like, no, we don't approve of this union and therefore you can't get married. It was a way for them to elope.

All right, so the Fuatina was essentially an elopement. The key to the Fuatina, though, was that the couple would wait a little while, say a week, and then they would return home. And their families would presume that over the course of that week, this couple had had premarital sex. So when they came back, the couple was like, now you have to agree to letting us get married. And in fact, it's going to be a specific type of marriage that's prescribed by law and socially. It's called the matrimonial repertory.

It's called a rehabilitating marriage, right? That's right. And that was a legal thing. It was a socially accepted thing to where you could restore honor to that bride. It was a loophole if you wanted to get married and your parents didn't like you were getting married to. But there is a very dark version of this in which a man could take a woman that he wanted to marry, even if she didn't want to.

He could take her away, he could kidnap her, he could hold her against her will, he could sexually assault her. And then in the same way that that elopement, which was consensual, would have to be, you know, could restore that marriage, they would then come back with a woman and say, well, you are now a tainted woman. If you, your damaged goods, no one's going to marry you. So, if you want to restore your honor, and you want to have a family one day and be married, then you have to marry me, your, maybe your captor and assaulter.

Yeah, and so it's a no-win situation here, right? Because if you wanted to be not ostracized by your community, if you wanted to ever get married because no one would marry you after you were essentially tainted goods because you had been sexually assaulted by this man, the only way out of it was to consent to this rehabilitating marriage

because it would restore your honor. And then also conveniently, it erased any criminal act that had led to that marriage. Legally, it let the man off the hook for kidnapping and sexual assault because the woman had married him, even though she had no choice. If she ever wanted to get married and say, have kids,

her only chance now was with the man who had kidnapped and sexually assaulted her. That's just how that worked. Yeah, so this was a thing that went seemingly completely unchallenged, as far as anyone knows, until the mid-1960s, when a woman named Franca Viola came along and said no. In 1963 in her hometown of Alcamo, she was

15 years old, she was engaged to a 23-year-old nephew of a Sicilian mafioso, his name was Filippo Melodia, And they were headed toward marriage, but he got nabbed for a crime, for theft. Six months into their engagement, she broke it off. He fled to Germany to escape this going to prison, basically. And while he was gone, she became engaged. She fell in love to another guy, this guy she grew up with named Giuseppe Ruizzi. Her former fiance, I guess, Melodia, came back in 1965, said, I want you back, and she said, no, I really love this guy, I'm staying with him. Yeah. So, Melodia kept trying over and over again to win her back, and she kept saying

no every time. So, as each time he was becoming angrier and angrier, and also he was humiliated every time that she turned him down. So he hatched a plan where he would kidnap Franca from her home, he and 15 other men did on the day after Christmas in 1965. And he held her at a farmhouse and he sexually assaulted her there

over the course of a week, which effectively triggered that matrimonial repertory. Like it gave her no choice at that point. Then after the week she was released and then as part of this custom, initially Melodia and his accomplices were arrested. But the choice was up to Franca to press charges or to marry the guy. That was her choice. And again, up to this point, as far as we know, every single woman put in this position agreed to marry the person who'd kidnapped and sexually assaulted her.

That's right. So I feel like that's halfway point. It's a good time for a break. And we'll tell you what happened right after this. This is Tracy V. Wilson from Stuff You Missed in History Class. Do you like podcasts, music, and audiobooks? Because when you subscribe to Amazon Music Unlimited, you get all three in one app. Imagine listening to your favorite podcasts and music on the go to work, school, the gym, or better yet, vacation. Now imagine being on vacation

with your favorite audio book from Audible, then listening to a new one every month from a huge selection of popular titles. That sounds like a pretty good vacation, right? Audible is now included on Amazon Music Unlimited. Download the Amazon Music app now to start listening. Terms apply. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max.

You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together.

You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real inspiring stories from the people you know, follow and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so I actually kind of spoiled it earlier when I said that she said no, but

that's exactly what happened. Franca very, very bravely decided to press charges. And like you said, she was the first woman in modern times, maybe of all times, to say, I'm not participating in this. Even though her honor was tarnished, her family's reputation was tarnished, they got threats, their barn and their vineyard were burned down, because remember this is a nephew of a mafioso, so some heavy things were going down. And these guys were arraigned for trial. It became an international story in 1966. They knew he did it, so it wasn't like, did you do it or not? He basically said, no, no, no, I was lovesick, she loved me too, and it was the parents who

didn't approve, so this is just like a good old-fashioned eloping. What was that called? Fuitina. It's like a good old-fashioned Fuitina. And she said this, I am the property of no one. No one can force me to love a person I do not respect. Honor is lost by the one who does certain things, not the one who is subjected to them. Right.

Whew. She also said to him directly from the stand, I do not love you. I will not marry you. And she was, despite she was going against all custom, and again, like I think it's worth pointing out, her family stood by her, and rather than pressuring her to do, you know, what the community and society wanted her to do, that was extremely brave of them as well.

And in return for her bravery and courage, she won. Melodia lost his case. And because rape and kidnapping were still crimes in Sicily and Italy, he was sentenced to 11 years in prison, ended up serving 10. And seven of his 15 accomplices received four-year sentences each. And I guess kind of joyously, two years after Filippo Melodia got out of prison, so he spent ten years in prison, within two years he'd been gunned down in Modena in Italy, famous for its balsamic vinegar.

So the media, you know, got a hold of this story, like I said earlier, and you might think like the media talked about like just how awful this was. They did in a way, but the media in Italy also talked about how pretty she was. And there were on TV, there were panel discussions where they talked to local men about like, hey, like, you know, she's good looking, would you still marry her? And, you know, they were all like, no, I still wouldn't marry her. So, the media coverage was just very sexist and not fair. But she did get married to Giuseppe. They were married December 1968. She was 20 by this time. He

was 25 years old. And it was a, like, it was a national celebration, basically, when she got married. Yeah. Surprisingly, there's a huge happy ending to this. Giuseppe is another person who deserves credit for standing by her too. He was honestly her only chance. He was the only man who could step up and restore her honor because essentially they got married under a matrimonio riparare. And yeah, it was a celebration by the country so much so that Italy's president, and I think

Mashable pointed this out, Italy's president directly sent them a wedding present of $40, which would be over $250 today. And the transport minister gave them a month of free railway rides. So like, this woman- Hey, would we get a rail pass? Yeah, pretty much. I mean, a month of it, that's pretty good for a newlywed couple, right? Yeah. So they, she went from scorned

and people in the media talking about how her life was basically over, she was going to be a spinster, to being celebrated in Italy by the very people who had essentially tried to pressure her into submitting to Melodia's advances. Yeah. And this was 1966 when it happened.

So you would think, well, in 1967, they probably got rid of this thing. Not so. It took till 1981 to repeal that law, which is staggering. I can't believe it took that long. Yeah. that law, which is staggering. I can't believe it took that long. Yeah, the Fugitina's still around, and the rehabilitation marriage is still around, but the key is that if you rape the woman,

you are no longer off the hook if she marries you. And yeah, the fact that it took more than a decade is a little unnerving, but that was one of the things that she did. She kind of shined an international spotlight on this really backwards custom. And Italy and Sicily were kind of like shrinking a little bit in this spotlight because it just made them look so bad. So that was one thing she did.

And also she was credited for inspiring no less than four women in the same situation to press charges on their abductor and assault her by the time she even got to trial. Who knows how many she inspired after that. So she changed this custom that was so old. You can't even tell when it would have began. Yeah, for sure. If you think, why haven't I seen this movie? Well, you can. There's a filmmaker named Marta Savina, who had an award-winning short film called Viola, and she turned that into a feature film called Primadonna, or The Girl from Tomorrow. part of the happy ending on International Women's Day in 2014, President Giorgio Napolitano bestowed on Franca the honor of Grande Officiale del Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana, which means that she was essentially knighted for her act of bravery.

Amazing. Amazing. Huge hat tip to Yumi. I had never heard of Franco Viola until she mentioned her to me. I think she sent me an article a while back. So yeah, I appreciate that. I think the whole world does now. Yeah, did she, was it from,

did she see the movie or was it just from something she read? I think she ran across something, like an article on the internet and sent it to me. So yeah. I wanna check out that movie and see what that's like. Yeah, and a huge hat tip to Franco Viola too for being so brave That's just what an amazing story Agreed Chuck said agreed short stuff is out

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