The Making of the Italian Husband in Nineteenth-Century Italy

Abstract

In 1892, Adele Terribile appeared before the Roman civil court requesting a legal separation from her husband, Cav. Beniamino Sant’Agata. In the court papers, Adele recounted how, shortly after she had been forced to wed Sant’Agata in 1879, she discovered that her husband had been institutionalised and diagnosed with monomania. Since the day of her wedding, she claimed, her life had been one of ‘continual suffering and physical and moral torture’. Becoming a father exacerbated Sant’Agata’s illness and made life a ‘nightmare of fear and persecution’ for Adele and her children. Despite her misery, she did not begin to contemplate leaving her marriage until the winter of 1891, when Sant’Agata forcibly committed her to a private asylum outside of Rome. She was released a month later after doctors concluded that she showed no sign of mental illness. She returned home willing to forgive her husband this ‘enormous abuse of conjugal power’ for the sake of her children. However, a few months later, when she discovered that Sant’Agata had contracted a venereal disease as a consequence of a series of illicit affairs, yet still insisted on ‘exercising his conjugal duties’, she decided that she and her children had to leave.1 Her account of her ill-starred marriage, born under duress, to a man unfit to be a husband, and congenitally incapable of conjugal or paternal love, bears out the many ways in which marriage came to define masculinity in late nineteenth-century Italy.