Short Stuff: Franca Viola

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 https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 0:39Josh Clark?

  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.

• 0:47Speaker 02

  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.

• 0:59Josh Clark?

  Yeah. So if you go down to Sicily and Southern Italy and ask them what a fuotina is, they will say, ah, 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 fuotina was essentially an elopement.

• 1:32Josh Clark?

  The key to the fuotina 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 matrimonio ripitoria. It's called a rehabilitating marriage, right?

• 2:04Speaker 02

  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 was 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

• 2:46Speaker 02

  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."

• 3:04Josh Clark?

  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

• 3:48Josh Clark?

  with the man who had kidnapped and sexually assaulted her. That's just how that worked.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  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.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  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, for a crime, for theft. Six months into their engagement, she broke it off. He fled to Germany to, you know, 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 Ruiz. Her former fiance, I guess, Melodia came back in 1965, said, I want you back.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  And she said, no, I really love this guy. I'm staying with him.

• 4:56Josh Clark?

  Yeah. So Melodia kept trying over and over again to, 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 repertoire. 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

• 5:37Josh Clark?

  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 kidnapped and sexually assaulted her.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  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.

• 6:16Josh Clark?

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• 8:36Speaker 02

  All right, so I actually 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?"

• 9:20Speaker 02

  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?

• 9:31Josh Clark?

  Fuatina.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  It's like a good old fashioned fuatina. 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."

• 9:48Josh Clark?

  Right. 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, I think it's worth pointing out, her family stood by her. And rather than pressuring her to do 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.

• 10:29Josh Clark?

  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 10 years in prison, within two years, he'd been gunned down in Modena in Italy, famous for its balsamic vinegar.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:36Josh Clark?

  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 the her only chance. He was the only man who could step up and restore her honor. Because essentially, she they got married under a matrimonio rifare. 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

• 12:18Speaker 02

  Hey, rail pass?

• 12:19Josh Clark?

  Yeah, pretty much. I mean, a month of it? That's pretty good for a newlywed couple, right?

• 12:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:24Josh Clark?

  So they she 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.

• 12:43Speaker 02

  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 wasn't, it took till 1981 to repeal that law, which is staggering. I can't believe it took that long.

• 13:00Josh Clark?

  Yeah, the futina is 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, a little unnerving. But that was one of the things that, 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, the 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 for, to, to press charges on their abductor and assault her by the time

• 13:44Josh Clark?

  she even got to trial. Who knows how many she, she inspired after that. So she changed this custom that was so old. I, you can't even tell when it would have began.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  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 Prima Donna, or The Girl From Tomorrow.

• 14:13Josh Clark?

  Yes. And in the even happier part of the happy ending, on International Wednesday 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.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  Amazing.

• 14:36Josh Clark?

  Amazing. Huge hat tip to Yumi. I had never heard of Franca Viola until she, 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.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. Did she, was it from, did she see the movie? Or was it just from something she read?

• 14:52Josh Clark?

  I think she ran across something like an article on the internet and sent it to me. So, yeah.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  I want to check, check out that movie and see what that's like.

• 14:58Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And a huge hat tip to Franca Viola, too, for being so brave. It's just, what an amazing story.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Agreed.

• 15:05Josh Clark?

  Chuck said agreed. Short stuff is out.

• 15:11Speaker 03

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