Emotional Arenas: Life, Love, and Death in 1870s Italy, by Mark Seymour, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020, x + 228 pp., £60 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-19-874359-0

The circumstances of the murder were pieced together by a thorough enquiry, followed by a trial, held in Rome in the autumn of 1879; together, these generated a rich repository of material, consisting of statements made during the interrogations and hearings, documents seized (including personal correspondence), and vivid in-depth press coverage. On the basis of this documentation, Seymour identifies five ‘emotional arenas’, meaning five public and private spaces characterised by relationships in which the interaction and communication could be intensely emotional: the private space of a marriage, that of Giovanni and Raffaella; the space of circus performance, with the strong emotions generated, including erotic ones (the male and female artistes performing acrobatic numbers wore close-fitting leotards that elicited reactions of desire from both the male and female public, involving fantasy or, sometimes, action); the space of illicit affairs, documented by the letters that admirers sent to Pietro Cardinali; the space of mortality, in reference to the new way in which both public death (especially that of King Victor Emmanuel II, on 9 January 1878) and private death (that of Giovanni Fadda, although this quickly became a public event) were experienced in a country in which the Catholic Church still exerted a profound influence, but no longer had exclusive control of the moment of passing; and, finally, the space of judicial proceedings, in the situation in which a case became a real ‘show trial’, closely followed by the public and the press. Very often, however, the working through of emotions appears evident in the construction of public events: for example, in the manner in which the funeral of Victor Emmanuel II was organised; in the way the press shaped its story-telling around an episode of ‘criminal love’; and in the way the trial itself became a public performance, both within Rome's Court of Assizes itself and in its reflection in newspaper articles, often accompanied by evocative illustrations, a good number of which Seymour deftly employs.