Abstract
The historical peculiarities of marriage law in modern Italy have been sufficiently interesting to provide the inspiration for several feature films, the most famous of which is undoubtedly ‘Divorce Italian Style’. Released in 1960 to great acclaim, the film’s plot satirises the absence of a divorce law in Italy (a fact which to many was proof that the nation of the ‘economic miracle’ still harboured vestiges of medieval Church law deep within the mechanisms regulating private life). The film’s narrative follows various amusing schemes hatched by a Sicilian baron, Fefe Cefalu, to murder his wife of many years so that he can marry a nubile sixteen-year-old. Fefe knows Italian civil law is absolutely rigid about the indissolubility of marriage, but he also knows that if he can contrive to have his exceedingly faithful wife commit adultery and make his subsequent murder of her appear to be a crime of passion, the criminal law will be indulgent and he will soon be free to marry again.1
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