Murder and Media in the New Rome The Fadda Affair

This book provides an insightful look into the origins of modern Italian media culture by examining a sensational crime and trial that took place in Rome in the late 1870s, when a bloody murder triggered a national spectacle that became the first great "media circus" in the new nation of Italy, crucially shaping the young state's public sphere and image of itself. The value of the Fadda Case resides in its messiness and its resistance to demonstrating any simple historical formula, as well as its intimation of the postmodern centrality of performance and the displacement of substance by sensation.