Circeo: the series on the Circeo massacre arrives on TV after the femicide of Giulia Cecchettin

Although the broadcast has been postponed several times over the last year, it was perhaps fate that Circeothe miniseries produced by Cattleya, Paramount+, Vis and Rai Fiction, arrived on Rai1 just at the moment in which the public debate around gender violence it’s so alive. The impression we have, in fact, is that Donatella Colasanti’s battle to make her voice heard against the sinister and disproportionate violence of three boys who thought they destroy his will and that of her friend Rosaria through violence and torture seems, today like forty-eight years ago, more relevant than ever. Decades have passed since that cursed night at Circeo and since long process that followed – trial during which a girl who was miraculously alive had to convince the court that those three daddy’s boys deserved life imprisonment and not the pat on the cheek they thought they would receive thanks to the good family name -, but today’s women continue to clash against a world that seems to perpetually see them as prey.

The brutal murder of Giulia Cecchettinthe 105th victim of feminicide in Italy since 2023 began, makes us understand not only that we need to continue fighting, but also that this world increasingly needs girls like Donatella, brilliantly played in the fiction by Ambrosia Calderelliand of combative women like Teresa Capogrossi, who has the expressive and profound face of Greta Scarano, symbol of all those women who took risks to try to break the mold. Their war to ensure that the crime of sexual violence was no longer considered an offense to public morality but rather damage to a private citizen has in fact opened a new course of history, even if today’s news teaches us that the definitive victory is still far away.

Almost fifty years after what happened at Circeo, many guys interviewed on TikTok say they don’t want to let their girlfriends go to the disco alone not because they are afraid of the harassment that they might suffer from other boys but because they don’t trust their women: this is the defeat that stings the most of all, and this is the reason why a certain normalization of force-based relationships between men and women have crept under the skin and become endemic. Reality, as we know, is much more complicated than that, and here’s why miniseries like Circeo and testimonies like that of Elena Cecchettin – targeted for the eyeliner on her eyes as if this would somehow soften her pain and anger – must continue to be heard.