Assassinations and Murder in Modern Italy Transformations in Society and Culture

Contemporary Italian history has been marked by an extraordinary series of murders and political assassinations. The shooting of King Umberto in 1900 by an anarchist, the various attempts on the life of Mussolini, the killing of former prime minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in 1978, and the shooting of the student Carlo Giuliani by a policeman during the G8 protests in Genoa in 2001 were all highly controversial events that provoked far-reaching reactions. The contributions to this book explore these and many other Italian true crime and political murder cases. They analyze them in their historical and cultural contexts and explore the films, fiction, theatre and art that they have inspired.

Stephen Gundle is Professor of Film and Television Studies at Warwick University. He is the co-editor of The New Italian Republic: from the Fall of the Berlin Wall to Berlusconi (1995) and author of Between Hollywood and Moscow: the Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture 1943-91 (2000) and Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy (2007). He is also co-author of The Glamour System (2006) and of Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War (2007).
 
Lucia Rinaldi has recently completed her PhD dissertation at Royal Holloway, University of London on postmodernism and identity in contemporary Italian crime fiction. She has published articles on popular fiction and television adaptations of detective fiction. She is at present a Teaching Fellow in Italian at the University of Exeter.