Emotional arenas: from provincial circus to national courtroom in late nineteenth-century Italy

Abstract

This article investigates a revealing moment in Italian history, during which a court of law in Rome became a complex arena of emotions. Building on Barbara Rosenwein's concept of ‘emotional communities', the analysis presents the trial as an episode in which divergent communities' styles were adjudicated as part of an attempt to establish more uniform emotional standards for a relatively new polity. The murder victim, a circumspect official based in the capital, and his assassin, an exuberant circus acrobat from the distant provinces, represented different communities within the national fabric, and embodied opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. The court exalted the victim's self-control and condemned the murderer's unmediated emotional exploits. Yet, the trial was not a simple object lesson in restraint vanquishing emotion. Instead, the analysis focuses on the way the state, eager to garner the legitimacy deriving from keen public participation in its processes, trod a fine line between the sober decorum of a court of law and the emotional colour of an ancient Roman circus. Ultimately, this case study suggests that for historians the task of discerning ‘emotional communities' is complicated by the fact that any such community is likely to be fraught with fault lines, among which variables such as gender, class, and geographical region are intersected by more volatile factors such as personal opportunity, social context, and historical moment.