It’s 25th November, and unfortunately I’m not feeling well enough to attend the women’s march against gender-based violence this year — so this is just a quick update, and the route of the ongoing march in Rome, which started at 2:30 PM, from Circo Massimo to Piazza San Giovanni, in case anybody wants to join it:
A lot has been going on in the past weeks here in Italy, as if what’s happening on a global scale wasn’t already enough to bear: it might not have made it to world news, but Giulia Cecchettin was just the umpteenth woman here in Italy killed by a man “who loved her too much” — NOT.
That’s totally not love, just their distorted narrative. He couldn’t bear standing next to an independent young woman who was doing better than him in academia, and didn’t need him. Emotional and economical dependency are not love. Loving someone should be just out of love, not out of need. It should be unconditional. But her murderer, her former fiancé (whom everybody described as a nice guy, who was described by his own father by “just a little jealous and clingy, but he always has money in his wallet, and also a credit card”, as if having a bank account was a character trait and a guarantee of trustworthiness), thought otherwise: he brutally killed her, dumped her body near a lake, and then was on the run for a week before being eventually taken under arrest in Germany.
It’s exhausting, 107 women were murdered by men in similar circumstances only in 2023.
This afternoon, a multitude of people is marching, women especially, but also anyone who thinks the issue is indeed systemic and the government should do something — will they? I very much doubt so, especially the current one (not that the previous ones did much anyway…), but that’s what we’ll keep asking for until the problem is adequately tackled. They've promised they'll publish a pamphlet against gender-based violence.
A pamphlet.
Who do they think they are, Lady Whistledown from Bridgerton?
I wish I didn't have to type such a short and bleak issue of this usually silly newsletter, normal service will resume shortly — but not today, sorry.
Thanks for the reminder, Giorgia, that all that beauty, history, and incredible food that draws us to Italy doesn't fully cover the dark side.
It is, sadly, the same the world over. I remember having this conversation in 1980 (!) with a (male) friend, who couldn’t understand why women reacted a certain way. I replied: when men stop killing, or hurting, women they ‘love’, then I guess women will stop reacting that way.