Introduction

Abstract

On October 6, 1878, a war hero stationed in Rome was stabbed to death. Near the scene, police apprehended a blood-spattered circus acrobat who protested his innocence in a pronounced Northern accent. Newspapers quickly reported a link between the two men: the soldier’s estranged wife, living with her family in Calabria, was said to be the acrobat’s lover. Soon arrested, she too denied everything, claiming never to have heard the rumor, already bandied about in the press, that her husband’s war wound had left him impotent. Several days later police in Calabria arrested a second woman, the circus company’s equestrienne, alternately described as the acrobat’s sister and wife.