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.
Chapter 1: Who is Franca Viola and why is she significant?
Chapter 2: What is the fuatina and its implications?
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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, uh... 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. So 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 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 would then come back with a woman and say, well, you are now a tainted woman. If you you're 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, maybe your captor and assaulter.
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Chapter 3: How did Franca Viola's story challenge societal norms?
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 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.
giving yourself that agency to not just be one thing, right? I don't have to be the perception that is crafted or the version of me that everyone is kind of projecting onto me. Like I am having my human experience and it is faceted. It's so faceted and it's fascinating. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and Deeply Well is a sanctuary for your healing.
I'm Devi Brown, healer, well-being expert, teacher, and fellow seeker. And each week, we explore what it means to become whole through soul-expanding conversations and practices. Why focus on tiny joys? Well, because they remind us of what it means to be human. They anchor us in the present moment and they create ripples of gratitude that nourish our spirit. Tiny joys are acts of self-love.
To hear this and more ways to prioritize your peace, listen to Deeply Well from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
AT&T, connecting changes everything. Hi, I'm Radhi Devlukia and I am the host of A Really Good Cry podcast. And I had the opportunity to talk to Devi Brown.
Devi Brown is one of the most sought after wellness educators and through her signature blend of advanced meditation, breathwork, metaphysical physiology, spiritual psychology and holistic trauma informed facilitation, Devi has touched the lives of countless students, including renowned artists, athletes and executives of global corporations.
But anything can be used as a tool of avoidance. With women, any kind of thing where there might be this underlying edge of self-sacrifice as martyrdom, if you're never filling, you're telling yourself a story and you're actually avoiding what you should be doing. Your life at the end of it is still going to be a sum of your experiences. And so you got to get in, you got to get your hands dirty.
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Chapter 4: What was the outcome of Franca Viola's case?
Chapter 5: What does the concept of 'rehabilitating marriage' entail?
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, 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.
Chapter 6: How did the community react to Franca Viola's defiance?
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, 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 Ruisi. Her former husband. 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 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.
giving yourself that agency to not just be one thing, right? I don't have to be the perception that is crafted or the version of me that everyone is kind of projecting onto me. Like I am having my human experience and it is faceted. It's so faceted and it's fascinating. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and Deeply Well is a sanctuary for your healing.
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Chapter 7: What lessons can we learn from Franca Viola's bravery?
So this is just like a good old-fashioned eloping. What was that called? Fuatina. 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.
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, like I think it's worth pointing out, her family stood by her and rather than pressuring her to do, you know, what the 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 10 years in prison, within two years he'd been gunned down in Modena in Italy, famous for its balsamic vinegar. Yeah.
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 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 reprare.
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. Rail pass. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, a month of it. That's pretty good for a newlywed couple.
Right. Yeah. So they she she went from scorned and people in the media talking about how her life was basically over. She's 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.
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