On November 25, a sea of 500,000 women stormed the Italian capital, waving flags as they filed around the Vatican, through the Imperial Forum, and past the Colosseum. “Fermiamo il femminicidio,” they chanted—“Femicide must stop.” Some held posters with slogans such as Why does alcohol excuse his actions, and condemn mine? and No means No. Many wore pink bandannas, scarves, and hats.
Hundreds of miles away, in Messina, Sicily, despite torrential rains, women took to the streets chanting the same slogans. On the coldest weekend since last winter, crowds also formed in Turin, Padua, Bologna, and Milan. In some cases, the protests bordered on violence. In Rome, one group of women left a Molotov cocktail near the offices of Pro Vita & Famiglia, a nonprofit anti-abortion association. (The bomb never went off.)
The protests come in the wake of the gruesome murder of Giulia Cecchettin, a 22-year-old biomedical-engineering student at the University of Padua, who was stabbed to death by her 21-year-old ex-boyfriend, Filippo Turetta, on November 11. Her body was found inside a trash bag in a ditch on the outskirts of Venice a week later.
Ever since, on Italian social media, the topic of femicide has been inescapable, be it on the feeds of influencers such as Chiara Ferragni and Aurora Ramazzotti or the Instagram accounts of ordinary youths. “It even seems to have eclipsed the war in the Middle East,” one person I spoke to says.
On TikTok, young women have taken it a step further, sharing videos enumerating the telltale signs of dating a “malessere,” Italian for “bad man.” (One sign is if your man asks you to pull your skirt down when you get onto a Vespa; another is if he reads your texts.) The hashtag #femminicidio has amassed more than 240 million views on TikTok and 75,000 posts on Instagram, with women leaving comments such as “We are privileged to be alive.”
Public figures have spoken up about the conflict, too. Laura Pausini, a well-known singer, posted on X: “Educate your sons.” And the actress Cristiana Capotondi spoke up in a recent TV interview, blaming trap music of all things: “Why are we surprised that a 22-year-old man considers a woman an object?” (Violence against women is a fairly common theme in Italy’s trap music, a form of hip-hop that originated in the U.S. in the 1990s.)
Even politicians seem united on this front. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her rival the opposition-party leader Elly Schlein have agreed “to eradicate the toxic patriarchal culture of possession and control over women’s bodies and lives,” though some critics are accusing Meloni of inaction when it comes to legislation. (Meloni has walked an interesting line when it comes to women’s rights—she ascended to the prime ministership on an extremely conservative social agenda, yet publicly broke up with her boyfriend of 10 years, with whom she has a child, last month after he was caught hitting on a colleague.)
“Why does alcohol excuse his actions, and condemn mine?”
The reaction to the Cecchettin murder seems outsize when you consider that Italy’s femicide rate is actually quite low. According to the World Bank, in 2021, the female-homicide rate hovered at 0.4 per 100,000 inhabitants. By comparison, England, which witnessed its own reckoning following the murder of Sarah Everard by an off-duty policeman in 2021, was at 0.6 in 2020 (the last date for which data was available). In Austria, Germany, and France, the numbers for 2021 were 0.9, 0.8, and 0.7, respectively. The U.S. fares significantly worse, scoring a 2.9.
Which begs the question: Is this mass anger rooted in something deeper? Was Cecchettin simply the straw that broke the camel’s back?
Murder and Malaise
For months now, the media has been sensationalizing gender-based-violence cases. In late May, the murder of 29-year-old Giulia Tramontano by her boyfriend, the 30-year-old waiter Alessandro Impagnatiello, in Milan, made headlines in Italy for weeks on end. In June, the country mourned the death of 17-year-old Michelle Caruso, whose body was found next to a garbage dump in Primavalle, on the outskirts of Rome.
Then came the slow summer news cycle, which gave violent crimes even more traction. In September, The New York Times noted how high-profile murder and rape cases were placing a spotlight on Italy’s attitudes toward women.
After seven men raped a 19-year-old woman in Palermo that same month, the men’s WhatsApp messages to one another, where they wrote things like “100 cats on top of a bitch,” were leaked to the Internet. Meloni’s boyfriend weighed in at the time, declaring on live TV that women should not get drunk if they want to avoid getting raped. In support of the victim, dozens of celebrities shared the hashtag #iononsonocarne, Italian for “I am not a piece of meat.”
“People were already inflamed,” one person tells me. “Then this happened, and it really sparked a huge fire.”
“It even seems to have eclipsed the war in the Middle East.”
A few days after Cecchettin’s murder, her sister, Elena, wrote a letter to the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera. The problem wasn’t Turetta (the ex-boyfriend), she said—a timid, Catholic, middle-class student, Turetta fit Italy’s typical “good guy” profile—but society at large. “There needs to be a change, a cultural revolution that teaches respect, education, relationships.”
Elena’s letter hints at the real reason behind the protests and the source of the protesters’ anger. It’s worth noting that it wasn’t just young people, presumably seeing themselves in Cecchettin, who attended the protests—it was women of all ages. Women who were fed up with lifetimes spent at the mercy of a male chauvinism that’s endemic to Italian society. This is, after all, a country whose most famous politician’s most famous legacy is bunga bunga, of all things.
Up until 1981, Italy’s penal code mandated leniency in the event of “honor killings,” when a man comes across a “spouse, daughter or sister caught in illicit sex.” Beginning in 2011, a series called Mob Wives detailed how female gangsters can order someone to be killed but can’t take a lover or leave their man. The mafiosa only exists in relation to her husband—and often has no choice but to become involved in organized crime. When you consider that many of the poor, rural areas in Southern Italy, especially Calabria, still live under Mafia control, the situation for women seems outright dire.
Elsewhere, the stay-at-home culture of generations past—the idea of the nonna cooking elaborate meals for the men when they get home from work—is still standard. Only one in two women in the country work, while the European average is 67 percent. Italy also ranks poorly on the European Union’s Gender Equality Index.
“Giulia Cecchettin had two assassins,” the writer Dario Accolla posted on Instagram. “The first was the man who took her life. The second is the patriarchy, who taught that man he was allowed to kill her.”
“It’s not really about femicide,” one person tells me. “It’s about chauvinism, being frustrated by sexism in the workplace.”
“Giulia Cecchettin had two assassins. The first was the man who took her life. The second is the patriarchy, who taught that man he was allowed to kill her.”
“When there are fewer women in the workplace, it makes it harder for the men to take you seriously,” says a person who has been working in Italy for 30 years. “I always had problems with Italian men.”
“Think about the sexist jokes, ads in Italy, harassment in the workplace, and the inability of many men to accept the authority of women,” Valeria Valente, an Italian senator from the Democratic Party, told The New York Times. “It’s not just about one violent man—it’s a general attitude.”
Perhaps part of the reason this murder rocked the nation is because Cecchettin was a model student, scoring some of the highest grades in her classes. After her death, she became a symbol of vanquished hope for a rising generation of ambitious women—and a warning siren for older generations that things might not be getting better with time.
In the aftermath of Cecchettin’s public funeral this week in Padua, which drew a crowd of 10,000 and was broadcast on Italy’s main state-TV channel, social media is still simmering. A message from Elena Cecchettin rings ominously: “For you,” she writes, “we will burn everything.”
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at AIR MAIL