Franca Viola, story of the woman who said no to the shotgun wedding (and the mafia)

When she was kidnapped and raped for eight days, Franca Viola was 18 years old. She was on December 26, 1965, in Alcamo, Sicily, where Franca Viola she was born and raised with her family. She where she still lives today, she who is 76 years old, turned 9 January. She never left her town, there, while the voices in the streets and in the bars were divided between what was right and what was wrong, Franca Viola became the first Italian woman to refuse the “shotgun wedding”. At the age of 15, Franca, with the consent of her family, became engaged to Filippo Melodia, a wealthy young man from the village and nephew of a local mafioso. Sicily was that of the late sixties, of small landowners and sharecroppers. It was when Filippo was also accused of theft and belonging to a mafia gang that Franca Viola decided to leave him, supported by her father. From that moment Franca and her family were condemned to continuous intimidation, armed threats, destruction and burning of their vineyard. It didn't seem possible to that boy who was used to deciding (and obtaining) everything, to find himself faced with a woman who rejected him and a father who didn't let himself be scared.

Thus, Filippo Melodia organized Franca's kidnapping, convinced that he would convince her to give in in this way and on 26 December 1965 he burst into her house, beating her mother and taking away her eight-year-old brother together with Franca. And then released him shortly after. The one who wasn't freed was her, the girl who kept saying no. She that she wanted to decide for herself. Despite the rapes, the beatings, the prolonged fasting. A torture that lasted eight days. «I went without food for days and days. He mocked and provoked me. After a week he abused me. I was in bed, in a semi-unconscious state” Franca said.

The police managed to free her after discovering the place where she was kept segregated, first a country house and finally in the house of Melodia's sister. The latter was arrested the same day. What happened immediately afterwards was revolution. Franca Viola and her family refused the shotgun wedding and therefore Melodia was sent to trial. The penal code in fact provided an article, 530, which read: «For the crimes provided for by the first chapter and by article 530, the marriage that the perpetrator of the crime contracts with the offended person extinguishes the crime, also with regard to those who participated in the crime itself; and, if there has been a conviction, its execution and penal effects cease.” Furthermore, rape was considered a “crime against public morality and good customs”. And it remained so until 1996. In short, if the rapist decided to marry the woman, he did not end up on trial and avoided prison.

This was not the case for Melodia. The public prosecutor asked for 22 years for him while the public wondered, as the news reports of the time reported, if any other man would ever have had the courage to marry Franca Viola, “despite everything”. The defense tried to discredit her by portraying the kidnapping as “an elopement” because the couple had already had sexual relations, as reported by Melodia. However, the mud machine did not silence Franca Viola who continued to reiterate her right to choose and self-determine and he showed up at every court hearing. The trial ended in 1966 with an 11-year sentence for Filippo Melodia and his accomplices. The same ones who still live in Alcamo and Franca meets on the street. «I meet them every now and then», Franca Viola said in an interview given to The print. «I prefer to avoid them, but if I can't I greet them and they greet me, almost always lowering their eyes. Maybe they too were deceived, maybe that guy had told them what he later said at the trial, that I agreed to marry him but my father didn't.”

On 8 March 2014, Franca Viola, who over the years has become the symbol of women who fight for their rights and for emancipation, was awarded thehonor of Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic by president Giorgio Napolitano. She has never left Alcamo, where she lives, with the man she chose to marry in 1968, Giuseppe Ruisi. Together they became parents.