A marital tragedy and a revolutionary sentence

A woman falls in love with a young, handsome and rich man; this is an overwhelming love. She elopes with him, marries him, becomes the mother of his four children and continues to love him despite the fact that he turns out to be different and violent from the first days of the marriage. Twenty years later, when she manages the struggle and separates, during their last encounter she kills him and makes his body disappear.

She does not confess immediately; she does so after the corpse is found. Maria Grazia Calandrone’s novel Magnifico e tremendo stava l’amore [Magnificent and Tremendous Was Love] (Einaudi, 2024) is based on a crime story. The author’s text recounts the true story of a marital tragedy and murder, that went to trial, and concluded with an avant-garde and revolutionary sentence; the acquittal of the accused because she had acted in self-defense.

The protagonist of the book is Luciana, a beautiful girl from a good family, who was 17 years old in 1983 when she met Domenico while on holiday at the seaside in Calabria. He, a handsome 23-year-old, had a peculiar family history.  Their life together was characterized by beatings, humiliation, threats, and obsessions. In Rome, in January 2004, when she was 38 years old, she killed him with twelve stab wounds at the culmination of a violent argument. Then, with the help of her new partner, they threw his body into the Tiber River.

She did not always suffer in silence. When it got too much, she reported her husband and sometimes ran away, with the children. But then she returned. These are choices that with hasty judgments, and in retrospect, appear incomprehensible, but it must be said that this was in the 1990s, when the problem of domestic violence was not experienced with the same intensity as it is today. In Italy, at that time, there was not even a stalking law yet. Luciana nonetheless continued to love that boy for whom she had interrupted her studies, who turned out to be overbearing, possessive, and unfaithful.

The court that acquitted her without reservation took into consideration not only the act itself, the murder, but also the abuse she had suffered and recognized that Luciana killed him out of desperation. At that last encounter, Domenico tried to strangle her, so she defended herself so as not to die. Her companion was also acquitted.

This is not the first time Calandrone has written about domestic violence. In her book Dove non mi hai portata [Where you did not take me] (Einaudi, 2022, finalist for the Premio Strega) she reconstructed the story of Lucia, her biological mother, who fled from a violent husband she was forced to marry. Lucia attempted a new existence together with another man, Giuseppe. In love, they fled from Molise to Milan, but difficulties overcame them. According to the law of the time, she was guilty of serious offences: an adulterous affair and abandonment of the marital home. In 1965, Lucia and Giuseppe committed suicide in the Tiber River in Rome. They had abandoned their eight-month-old daughter, the author of the book, in the Villa Borghese park, trusting that someone else would take care of her.