Intimate Arenas

Beginning with their wedding in Naples in 1871, this chapter examines the emotional relationship between Giovanni Fadda, a captain of the Italian army originally from Sardinia, and his wife Raffaella Saraceni, daughter of a well-to-do Calabrian family. Based on family correspondence and eye-witness accounts, the argument is that the couple represented an emerging model of a marital emotional arena, one that represented united Italy’s modernizing vision. Fadda’s work as a military official required postings in remote parts of the new nation, and the couple needed to be more emotionally self-sufficient than those whose lives were embedded within stable networks of extended families. The realities of modern married life were particularly difficult for Raffaella, who was repeatedly drawn back to the older style of emotional arena represented by her family of origin in Calabria. Effectively, she rarely lived with her husband, despite his efforts to create emotionally secure domestic spaces as a framework for their marriage. Sexual difficulties are also hinted at by the battle-wound which earned Fadda a medal, and local gossip. The chapter traces the eventual breakdown of the relationship, and analyses the couple’s emotional responses through their letters. Ideas of sentiments within marriage expressed by the couple, close relations (particularly Raffaella’s mother and Giovanni’s brother), as well as a range of local observers, give a sense of how Italians saw marriage and the family as an emotional arena undergoing change during a time of cultural and political transition in the nation’s early history.