Travelling Italian history with La sposa

 Now I am the first to admit that television dramas are not the most reliable way to learn history, for all the obvious reasons.

But done well they can offer up something, and with the passage of time become historical pieces, showing us how thought about a period in the past.

And so, with that in mind on Sunday night we tuned into the three part drama La sposa [The Bride] which went out on Rai 1.

Sunday is not the most promising time to watch Italian TV, given that a big chunk of the afternoon and early evening is dominated by a series of light entertainment shows which seamlessly run into each other.

But La sposa promised to be something different.

It was according to the pre publicity, “a touching story about the personal and family growth of a woman and a poignant love story, which ….. is a series set in the past, but which speaks to the present. Faces topical issues like the female emancipation, the gender equality, and compliance with socio-cultural differences. A modern tale, whose protagonist is a courageous and strong female figure, a great example of tenacity and social redemption.

Italy, late 1960s. These were years of great changes and transformations, from customs to politics. But in some areas of the country archaic practices such as weddings by proxy, in which young Southern women are given in brides to Northern men, mostly farmers. This is it premise that triggers the story of La Sposa…”*

The practice of easing a family’s poverty or fulfilling a debt by selling off a child rolls down the centuries, but La sposa also highlights the economic disparities between the south and the north of Italy and the prejudice of some northern Italians to those from the south and is reflected in the Lega Nord [Northern League], which is a political party with an anti-south stance.  

And closer to home there is Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor Of Casterbridge written in 1886 which opens with the awful auction of Susan Henchard and her baby daughter at a country fair by her drunken husband.

So there is plenty of precedence for the story of La sposa.

The opening episode mixed the hard life in Calabria, and the strong family ties with the equally hard life in the north for the young woman who having exacted a pre-nuptial agreement that her future husband would “undertake to pay the debt, pay the rent, the studies of her brother Giuseppe and also organize the marriage of younger sister” is betrayed.

Well history it may be but it is also a drama with plenty of twists many of which reflect the Italy of the 1960s.

Location; Italy in the 1960s

Picture; Naples 2018, from the collection of Saul Simpson

* La sposa, Tonight on Rai 1 the First Episode of the New Fiction with Serena Rossi, Italy 24 News, Sunday January23rd, 2022