When we think about kidnapping in Italy, the first abduction that comes to mind is that of Aldo Moro, the former Prime Minister who was kidnapped and murdered by the terrorist group the Red Brigades in 1978. Yet kidnapping in Italy was not exclusively terrorist and ideological. On the contrary, it was a crime largely linked to Sardinian banditry, the Sicilian mafia (Cosa Nostra), and especially the Calabrian ’ndrangheta, who between the end of the 1960s and the end of the 1990s abducted nearly 700 people in Italy for ransom. Through the analysis of newspapers, broadcasts, parliamentary documents, and memoirs written by survivors, this talk explores the way the media represented this phenomenon and affected the audience, the public debates over how the state should combat the crime, and the testimonial narrative of the kidnapped against both their persecutors and political institutions. By focusing particularly on two pre-Moro case studies, this talk offers a narrative of 1970s Italy that, by looking at violence through criminal rather than political kidnapping, repositions that decade as the one in which organized crime horrified the Italian Republic.
Speaker Information
Alessandra Montalbano is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Alabama. She received her PhD in Italian Studies from New York University and her laurea in Philosophy from the Università degli studi di Verona. Her recent and forthcoming publications engage with issues ranging from victim-centered narratives of terrorism, to kidnapping victims’ experience of captivity, and the underworld of the Italian Republic. Other publications explore her interests in body, language, gender, and life writing, including studies of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Dacia Maraini, contemporary Italian feminism, Italo Calvino, and (forthcoming in The Journal of Italian Philosophy in April 2023) an article on the impact of “Hannah Arendt’s Embodied Theory in Giorgio Agamben’s Biopolitics and Adriana Cavarero’s Vulnerability.” Her book Ransom Kidnapping in Italy: Crime, Memory, and Violence is currently in press with the University of Toronto Press.
