ROSSELLA CASINI: THE FACE OF HISTORY

The story of Rossella Casini is a story of women—of many women: her own story, that of her mother, her friends, and her university classmates; also that of her sister-in-law and of those who decided her fate. Here is part of her story.

The only image of Rossella Casini

When we speak of the innocent victims of the Italian mafias, we often assume we are referring only to people from the southern regions of Italy, where traditional mafias—Cosa Nostra, the Camorra, the Sacra Corona Unita, and the 'Ndrangheta—originated. Yet, among the more than a thousand stories of innocent victims of the mafia in Italy—as listed by the association Libera. Associazioni, nomi e numeri contro le mafie—many belonged to people from the central and northern regions of the country. They crossed paths, on an ordinary day and for all sorts of reasons, with an “accident,” a person, or a situation connected to the mafia underworld.

These innocent people—many of them women—were not simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were living their lives, their time, and lost them through no fault of their own, sometimes even in the midst of the struggle against organized crime. The ’Ndrangheta is one of the most powerful criminal organizations in the world, and its history is full of ordinary names and unknown faces—names and faces that once belonged to workers, women and men who, in some cases, were swallowed by fear and oblivion, and in others, became a source of family shame that contaminated even their memory.

There are two main reasons why women are killed by members of the ’Ndrangheta: some are murdered by chance or misfortune, while others are killed because the mafia sees it as necessary. Whatever the reason, the numerous cases of women murdered by the mafia prove that there is no such thing as a “code of honor” that spares women or children from mafia violence. Dozens upon dozens of women have been, and continue to be, exterminated for claiming the right to follow their own feelings, desires, and impulses—or simply for trying to escape the suffocating grip of mafia culture, in hopes of not being killed by a backward, patriarchal mentality.

In recent decades, women have also taken on active roles within criminal organizations. Some, more or less independently, choose whether or not to participate in mafia activities—often upholding a historically imposed role as the wife, mother, sister, or daughter of a mafioso. In very rare cases, they rise to lead mafia families themselves, thanks to their deep understanding of criminal dynamics—an understanding shaped, ironically, by having conformed to the mafia’s own image of womanhood. When women reach such positions of power, their strength lies in the secrets they absorb in daily life—wielding their influence even at the expense of their own children.

At the same time as this new wave of an age-old feminine revolution began to emerge, in the world of organized crime—where mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters were expected to remain silent and obedient—some women began to raise their heads, to say no, to wrest their sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers from lives marked by violence, prison, and death. But this revolution did not only affect women born into mafia families. Courage also ran through those who unknowingly crossed paths with the mafia’s fate—like Rossella Casini.

Rossella was born on May 9, 1956, in Florence, one of Italy’s most important artistic cities. Her family could have been the portrait of the typical Western family during the golden years of capitalism. Her father, Loredano, was a worker at the Fiat automobile company, and her mother, Clara, was a housewife dedicated to raising their only daughter. Rossella grew up healthy and strong, with a gentle face and deep eyes that seemed to see right through people. After finishing high school, she enrolled in the University of Florence to study psychology. She continued living with her parents in Borgo La Croce, a neighborhood very close to the historic Sant’Ambrogio market. Their home was an old 15th-century building originally built to house the poor and the sick, which, over time and through the political changes of the Florentine Republic, had ended up as the last lodging for those condemned to death. In that same building, alongside Rossella and her parents, were small apartments mostly rented out to university students attending the same university as Rossella. Among the tenants was a student who, though attending university, was enrolled at a different one—the Economics faculty in Siena. This young man, who was kind and respectful toward Rossella, was not from Florence. He was from Palmi, a town in the southern region of Calabria. His name was Francesco Frisina, and his father, Domenico, was the head of a Calabrian mafia family.

Over time, the two young people fell in love and began to share their days and nights, their dreams—but not their nightmares. Rossella and Francesco made their relationship official, and in the summer of 1978, they decided to travel to Palmi with Rossella’s parents to meet Francesco’s family. During the families’ time together in Calabria, everything seemed normal and pleasant, and both sets of parents approved of the relationship. However, Rossella’s parents noticed strange occurrences in Palmi—events that centered around Francesco’s father. At the time of the trip, Calabria, and particularly Palmi, was bleeding from a faida—a mafia war—between the Condello–Parrello clans on one side and the Gallico–Frisina clans on the other. The war lasted until 1990 and claimed over a hundred lives. Rossella’s parents didn’t fully grasp how serious the situation was and allowed her to return the following year with her mother to vacation again in Palmi, this time accompanied, of course, by Francesco. As mother and daughter began enjoying the sea and the beautiful beaches along the Mediterranean, mafia violence tore the veil from their eyes.

On July 4, 1979, Domenico Frisina—Francesco’s father—was murdered. Rossella and her mother were suddenly confronted with a brutal, unfamiliar world, full of archaic words like faida, ’ndrina, and pizzo, and horrific images—like those of the criminal family, her boyfriend’s family. With her father-in-law’s assassination, Rossella understood why Francesco only spoke of his dreams and never of his nightmares. That killing laid bare everything. Francesco told Rossella the full story of his family—his story. After listening, Rossella made a decision that would change her life, her partner’s, her mother’s, and her future mother-in-law’s forever. She convinced her mother to return to Florence, while she stayed behind to support her boyfriend through the loss of his father.

Rossella spent several months in Calabria, but her university studies and exams eventually forced her to return home. On the train journey back to Florence, she had to transfer in Rome. Upon arriving in the Italian capital, she tried to reach Francesco, who had remained in Palmi. When she finally made contact, she learned she couldn’t speak to him—he had been attacked the night before and now had a bullet lodged in his head. He was hospitalized in critical condition. The young Florentine abandoned her trip and returned immediately to Palmi. Francesco remained in a coma for several months—months during which Rossella never left his side. Eventually, she convinced him to be transferred to a hospital in Florence, under the pretense of better medical care. In truth, Rossella sought greater safety for Francesco. She knew very well that if she wanted to save his life, she had to get him away from his family, from Palmi, from Calabria.

Rossella was not from Calabria. But she fell in love with a Calabrian mafioso. And before many police officers, judges, or prosecutors, she understood that to defeat the ’Ndrangheta it was essential to speak out—to look within the State for people she could trust in order to break the chain of blood and death.

Fortunately, she was not alone. There was a police officer who knew the history of the faida di Palmi, who was familiar with Francesco’s family, and whom Rossella trusted. While Francesco continued his recovery in a Florence hospital following the attack, he agreed—at Rossella’s urging—to cooperate with the justice system. With Francesco’s initial testimony, the authorities were able to quickly solve several murder cases linked to the mafia war, as well as better understand the structure of the rival clans. On February 14, 1980, Rossella herself testified before the Public Prosecutor of Florence, recounting everything she had seen and heard during her stays in Palmi. Since the content of both Rossella’s and Francesco’s testimonies focused on events in Calabria, portions of their statements were forwarded to the Prosecutor’s Office in Palmi. Because of mafia infiltration in various sectors of the State, Francesco’s family quickly found out what was happening, despite the distance.

The girl from the north, the privileged child from the wealthy city of Florence—this outsider with modern ideas—was now seen as a bad influence on Francesco. She had to be removed so that the faida could return to its “normal” course, without outside interference. One of the first to express concern about Rossella, Francesco, and their cooperation with the justice system was Pino Mazzullo, who was married to Concetta—Francesco’s sister—and who exclaimed: “Ci ha inguaiati tutti!” (“She’s gotten us all into trouble!”). Pino requested a meeting with Francesco, intending to convince him to stop cooperating and to retract his previous statements to the police and the courts. The meeting took place in Turin, but its outcome remains unknown. Since the police were monitoring the movements of both Calabrians, three days after the meeting, both Pino and Francesco were arrested.

Rossella understood her family’s concern, but her love for Francesco kept her focused on one goal: to pull him away from the mafia. Yet fear and pressure from the ’Ndrangheta were closing in. Rossella’s father, Loredano Casini, found an anonymous death threat left in his daughter’s car. He tried repeatedly to convince her to end the relationship with Francesco and distance herself from the mafia world by any means necessary. But Rossella refused to give up on Francesco. She began traveling regularly to Calabria. Between journeys—by plane, train, or car—the young woman from Florence tried to figure out how to respond to the demands and pressures from Francesco’s family. Her relentless efforts to ensure safety for herself and her partner proved futile: the relationship with the Frisina family, and through them with the Calabrian mafia, was irreparably broken.

In the first month of 1981, Rossella was once again in Calabria. During those weeks, she kept regular phone contact with her father in Florence. Although she told him the relationship with Francesco’s family was difficult, she believed the situation might improve—mainly because, at the request of her in-laws, she had agreed to give new testimony to the authorities, this time retracting her previous statements. On February 21, Rossella met with the judge of the Palmi court and signed a document prepared by Francesco’s family lawyer, officially withdrawing all her earlier declarations. Rossella believed that this act would lead the family to forgive her. But that didn’t happen. Now it wasn’t only the family that had to forgive her—it was the Calabrian mafia. And it was the mafia who, immediately after her retraction, gave the order: “Kill the outsider.”

What Rossella had done was considered an offense too serious to ignore—committed by a woman who “knows nothing and understands nothing of our land,” and for that reason, “her offense must be washed away with blood.” Rossella had dared to break the omertà—the code of silence—and had even convinced a mafioso to do the same, to talk to the State, betraying his own family in the process. It was a situation the mafia could not leave unpunished. On the afternoon of February 22, 1981, Rossella’s father heard his daughter’s voice for the last time. She called to tell him she was preparing to return to Florence. After that final phone call, nothing more was heard from her for years. Rossella had her whole life ahead of her—she was only 25 years old—and yet she was not allowed to continue living. From that moment on, her parents searched for her tirelessly, desperately trying to uncover what had happened to their only daughter. Rossella’s mother died a few years later, broken by the grief of her daughter’s disappearance. Her father lived just long enough to learn that a trial for Rossella’s murder would begin.

One morning in July 1994, Rossella’s father was reading La Nazione, a newspaper from Florence, when he discovered that a mafia pentito—a justice collaborator—had told prosecutors what he knew about Rossella’s fate. The collaborator revealed that Rossella had been murdered and dismembered. That was how her father learned the truth about his daughter’s death: from a newspaper. No one from the State had contacted him. The State itself had disrespected him. The trial for Rossella’s murder began in March 1997, based on the testimony of pentito Vincenzo Lo Vecchio, a criminal originally from Palermo who had spent his years in hiding in Palmi under the protection of the Gallico family. It was he who recounted that Rossella had been tortured, murdered, and cut into pieces before being made to disappear. He detailed the entire story, including how the Frisina family had tried to divert the investigation by accusing their rival clan, the Condellos. He also testified before the court that the murder of Rossella was carried out with the consent of her boyfriend, Francesco, who at the time was in a medical facility in Messina, Sicily.

After multiple delays and procedural setbacks, in May 2006, the Court of Appeal delivered its verdict: all defendants were acquitted due to lack of evidence. Rossella’s body was never found. Despite the absence of sufficient evidence to convict the accused, the court’s ruling acknowledged that Francesco’s family had been involved in Rossella’s disappearance.

The motive that led Concetta Frisina—Francesco’s sister—to murder her future sister-in-law is immense, overwhelming, and undeniable. Rossella Casini, in a paradoxical reading where facts overturn social values, was the one who cast dishonor upon the “honorable” Frisina family. A family not only "stinking of mafia," but one whose associative (mafia) ties had already been confirmed by judicial investigations with the authority to pass judgment. A family in which Francesco Frisina had absorbed, without fail and without deviation, the teachings of that world—first and foremost, the duty to uphold omertà.

After the death of Loredano Casini—Rossella’s father—the story of the young woman faded into oblivion. For years, not even the face of the brave woman who dared to challenge the ’Ndrangheta was known. But thanks to other women like Rossella, her story of love and courage was not lost to time. For years, actresses, filmmakers, and writers have told and portrayed her story, denouncing the horrific fate of a woman who found neither justice nor truth. That is why, in 2013, during the “Day of Remembrance and Commitment” for all victims of the mafia, the Florence chapter of the association Libera, contro le mafie launched a public call to find a photo of Rossella. The search led to the discovery of the first image—a black-and-white photo from her university ID.

In 2019, on the occasion of Italy’s Republic Day, President Sergio Mattarella awarded Rossella the Gold Medal for Civil Valor. On that occasion, the President stated:

“Rossella was a university student in Florence who entered into a relationship with a man who turned out to be part of the criminal world of Calabria. Despite knowing the serious risks, she fought tenaciously to persuade him to sever all ties with the ’Ndrangheta, revealing to judicial authorities what she had learned about the criminal system itself.” —Excerpt from the official citation awarding Rossella the medal.

It was always women who, for many years, searched for a trace of Rossella—driven by the desire and commitment to give meaning to the memory of this young woman from Florence. To begin that process, it was necessary to find at least one photo. They found the photo—and it was thanks to the dedication of other women, who now, inspired by that image, fight every day to ensure that Rossella’s story of courage continues to carry the deep dignity of her unconditional love. The love of Rossella, and of all the girls and women who refuse to stop seeking to understand how love, too, can bring justice. The image of Rossella helped open up new visions of hope.

Like that moment when we women saw her face for the first time—and were truly moved. We felt the emotion of the story, of a terrible injustice: the ultimate injustice of violence against women, the arrogance of those who still believe they can break any woman, or manipulate any institution tasked with judging them for their crimes. But it was more than that. Beyond what seems to be the usual course of history—or what may appear to be just a single photo—there lies a fragment of justice, of dignity, even of legality. A dike of love against what feels like a relentless flood of violence. We are not naïve dreamers, deceiving ourselves into thinking it was more than just a photo found in a drawer. We are dreamers who believe in the strength of tenderness confronting the misery of savagery. And those who practice such brutality will be held accountable. If we do not allow them to bury in silence all the terrible things they have done, they will have no hope of escaping justice.