Between the 15th and 18th centuries, fear and superstition took deep root in the cities and countryside across Italy and Europe, giving rise to a period of systematic persecution now known as the witch hunts. These were not isolated outbreaks of hysteria, but rather the result of complex social, religious, and political dynamics that converged into a centuries-long war against those deemed “other.” Women, especially midwives, healers, widows, prostitutes, the poor, or simply those who defied the expectations of their time, became the main targets of this violence.
Accusations could arise from the smallest pretext: a failed harvest, a child's fever, a neighbor's grudge. People spoke of women casting curses, causing illness, souring milk, stealing livestock, or summoning storms. But behind these accusations lay far deeper cultural tensions: about nature, sexuality, power, and the fragile balance of daily survival.
Ancient rites that diverged from Catholic doctrine, folk medicine, and any form of female autonomy were systematically reframed as signs of diabolical activity.
Women themselves, especially those with particular physical traits or unconventional behavior, such as a squint, a limp, an irritable temper, or rare attendance at church, were considered suspicious, their presence seen as a threat to moral and spiritual order.
This climate of paranoia, often fueled by local authorities and religious institutions, was no accident; it served as a tool of control.
The Inquisition and Civil Tribunals constructed entire legal systems to identify, prosecute, and punish so-called witches. Through inquisitorial processes, suspects were forced under torture to confess not only to specific acts of maleficium, but also to attending nocturnal sabbaths, making pacts with the devil, and belonging to secret sects. The aim was not only to punish, but to extract a confession that reinforced the worldview of the Church and the State.
The foundations of these persecutions were laid in the 15th century, with the circulation of the first treatises on demonology and witchcraft. Among the most well-known: the Malleus Maleficarum (“The Hammer of Witches”), published in 1487 by Dominican inquisitor Heinrich Kramer with the help of Jacob Sprenger; the Formicarius by Johannes Nider (published in 1475); and De Lamiis et Phitonicis Mulieribus (“On Witches and Soothsaying Women”) by Ulrich Molitor (1489). These texts fused superstition with legal doctrine, presenting women who practiced witchcraft as a real and systemic threat to the Christian community.
The influence of these persecutions shaped judicial practices for generations. Although men, children, and even clergy were sometimes accused, nearly two-thirds of all witch trials involved women.
Interrogations focused on their bodies, searching for devil's marks, signs of corruption, or sexual deviance.
The trials themselves were spectacles of suffering. Although the stake is the most infamous image of these executions, long used to symbolize complete exclusion and damnation, many were also beheaded, hanged, or died under various forms of torture.
Punishments varied depending on location and culture, but the underlying logic remained consistent: fear had to be made visible.
The spread of these trials accelerated at the end of the 15th century, peaking in violence between the late 16th and mid-17th centuries. Then, gradually, they began to decline.
Enlightenment thought, changes in legal procedures, and growing skepticism toward religious institutions contributed to the waning of the phenomenon. By the early 18th century, the witch hunt had all but disappeared from most of Western Europe, yet the devastation and horrors it unleashed left their mark on collective memory.
Historians estimate over 110,000 witch trials took place in Western Europe alone, many ending in execution. The last known case was that of Anna Göldi, condemned in 1782 in the Swiss canton of Glarus, the last woman executed for witchcraft in Europe.
But the logic that fueled those persecutions did not vanish with the end of the trials. It merely changed form.
Those once called witches, later branded as “malacarne,” are today associated with the victims of femicide. A woman who lives freely, who exercises autonomy and resists control, has always aroused suspicion. From witch hunts to psychiatric confinement, the history of women punished for disobeying the “established order” continues into the present. One of the most insidious crimes of fascism in Italy was the systematic use of asylums to repress female behaviors deemed transgressive. During that time, the regime took a step backward by centuries, into a modern Middle Ages.
Women who did not conform to the fascist ideal of the devoted wife and mother, those seen as too exuberant, too independent, or physically “unfit”, were interned as threats to regime ethics. Emotional states such as fear, grief, or rebellion, if not properly contained, were pathologized into unspeakable torment.
Mussolini’s government passed laws to remove women from public life: halving women’s wages in 1927, limiting access to higher education, and confining them to domestic roles.
"The indisputable lesser intelligence of women prevents them from understanding that their greatest fulfillment lies in the family, as rightly defined by the seriousness of the husband." Ferdinando Loffredo, Politics of the Family, 1938.
Women became prisoners of a domestic system that demanded reverence and silence. Even Ida Dalser, Mussolini’s former lover, and their son Benito Albino Dalser, were interned in psychiatric institutions, where both died.
The stigma of being “malacarne” did not vanish with the fall of fascism. In the following decades, these so-called “places of care” continued to function as tools of social punishment for women who defied public morality.
A diagnosis of “extremely bizarre behavior undoubtedly due to mental imbalance” was enough to lock a woman away.
This continued until 1978, with the implementation of Law 180, also known as the Basaglia Law, which abolished asylums and ended institutional segregation of the mentally ill.
Yet, the unconscious legacy of male ownership over the female body and will persisted. Only in 1981 was the crime of honor formally abolished from the Italian Penal Code.
Today we live in a time when women enjoy greater rights, both in terms of legality and opportunity. Yet a deep resistance to this change endures, manifesting through acts of physical and psychological violence: the phenomenon of femicide. For a free woman, one who refuses to be merely a shadow of a man, whether as Adam’s rib or as a dutiful wife of the Fatherland—the story seems always the same, whether we speak of 1400 or 2025.
What we need is a real social transition that establishes equality beyond gender.
And as always, it will be women who must save themselves, not by clinging to symbols or superficial labels, but by standing firmly on the ground of rights, not identity.
Only then can Medusa, the demonized matriarch, meet Perseus not as a monster, but without suffering her tragic fate of being beheaded by the young hero.
Every November 25th, the “International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women” is marked by a succession of numbers.
A necessary act, but also a profoundly insufficient one.
Established in 1999 by the United Nations in memory of Patria, Minerva, and María Teresa Mirabal, three activist sisters killed on November 25, 1960, on the orders of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, known as "El Chivo”, this date aims to draw global attention to a systemic and deeply rooted issue in our society.
The data published by Italy’s Ministry of the Interior, though essential, paint a disturbing picture.
As years pass, the number of femicides in Italy shows no sign of decreasing. In 2021, 109 women were killed, 93 of them by partners, ex-partners, or family members.
While overall homicides in the country are declining, gender-based violence remains a tragic exception.
There are no safe zones—these cases are distributed evenly across the national territory, regardless of geography, social class, or cultural context.
These are not local emergencies or isolated incidents; they are the product of a system that has tolerated and continues to tolerate this violence.
A study of 211 femicide cases between 2017 and 2018 reveals that only 29 of the victims had filed a report, and in more than half of those cases, no protective measures were taken. Institutional inadequacy, from law enforcement to the judiciary, emerges as the final link in a long chain of systemic failures.
And yet, numbers alone are not enough. Statistics risk neutralizing the uniqueness of each case, obscuring the pain they contain.
Social decay does not explain everything. If the problem were only poverty or cultural backwardness, the answer would be progress, but it is not.
A simple search for the words “burned alive” reveals dozens of recent stories of Italian women who suffered this fate. A brutal, ritual act, aimed not only at physical destruction but also the symbolic erasure of the woman who dares to say no. In nearly all of these cases, the perpetrators are men.
 Palmina Martinelli, 14 years old, Fasano, near Brindisi.
Ylenia Lombardo, 33, burned in San Paolo Belsito, near Naples, in May 2021.
Roberta Siragusa, 18, Termini Imerese, January 2021.
Sara Di Pietrantonio, 22, in her car in Rome, May 29, 2016.
A 31-year-old woman, burned in her garden in Castellammare di Stabia, January 2021.
A 51-year-old woman in Roccasecca dei Volsci, province of Latina.
Mina Safine, 45, burned in Brescia, September 2020.
Maria Antonietta Rositani, burned on March 12, 2019, in Reggio Calabria—she survived.
Violeta Senchiu, 32, Sala Consilina, Salerno, November 4, 2018.
Vania Vannucchi, 46, Campo di Marte, Lucca, August 2, 2016.
Fabiana Luzzi, 16, stabbed and burned in Corigliano, Cosenza, May 2013.
Paola Burci, 18, burned in Rovigo in 2008.
Giovanna Comunale, 19, burned in Trapani, August 2003.
Graziella Mansi, 8, Andria, Bari, burned by eight older boys on August 19, 2000. Fifteen cases do not make a statistic, but they carry enormous symbolic weight.
They are not random tragedies. They speak of an archaic, repeated, and socially accepted violence, an endless slaughter to which we are increasingly indifferent. The echo of Margherita’s death, burned alive on an anonymous day in September 1523, still resonates in the history of our country, a deep wound that time has failed to heal.