The Girl Who Said No

Préface
I could so easily have missed the tiny item in the San Francisco Chronicle, but sometime during the spring of 1966, on the hunt for a Current Events article to bring to sixth-period Social Studies, I came upon the three-inch filler: RAPED SICILIAN GIRL REFUSES TO MARRY
Trapani, Italy
A young woman has shocked her countrymen by refusing to marry a man who raped her. Franca Viola, 18, has defied more than 1000 years of Sicilian tradition by rejecting nuptials with Filippo Melodia, 25, who tried to force her into marriage by the time-honored custom of abduction and rape. Convention dictates that Viola must accept a reparation marriage with Melodia to restore her broken honor. The tradition is still part of Italian law, which provides that all charges be dropped when a woman weds the man who has kidnapped and carnally violated her. The girl has publicly avowed that she has no intention of changing her mind, despite the forceful opinions of many of her townspeople. She has not left her family's modest white home for several weeks. They have endured repeated vandalism and threats of violence. I did not cut it outwe had to bring something front-page to classbut I never forgot the Sicilian woman's story.

Auteur
Natalie Galli, a San Francisco native of Italian background, has penned two illustrated children s books for Sunbath Studios: Ciao Meow and Spin The Hound Lost and Found, A Tale of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. She edited a third Sunbath Studios publication: LeeLee The Lizard Wants A Pizza. Her writings have been anthologized in Italy, A Love Story and in four volumes of Travelers Tales, three of which were awarded gold and silver prizes by the Bay Area Travel Writers. She has worked as an editor and proofreader for Burning Books, as a columnist for The Berkeley Monthly, and as a freelance contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Texte du rabat

In a timely account at this moment in the #MeToo movement, author Natalie Galli, of Sicilian-American heritage, travels on a personal odyssey to find the girl who broke a thousand-year-old Sicilian tradition that allowed kidnap and rape in pursuit of marriage. In the process, Galli uncovers a family secret, encounters the long arm of the Mafia, and discovers new strengths in herself as she successfully completes her quest.

Résumé
An eighteen-year-old woman named Franca Viola made history in 1966 as one of the first #metoo heroines of modern times, when she refused to go along with a centuries-old forcible marriage custom in Sicily. Having endured kidnap and rape, she publicly defied the expectation that she would marry the rapist to restore her broken honor. A social uproar occurred throughout the island and beyond. In Natalie Galli's The Girl Who Said No, Viola's remarkable story unfolds when the author arrives in Palermo to search for this brave heroine, with little more than the memory of a tiny article she had spotted two decades prior. Galli wanted to know: whatever had become of this courageous girl who had overturned an ancient, entrenched tradition? The riveting events after Franca pressed charges with the police form the core of this gripping memoir. Viola was subjected to public taunting whenever she appeared on the streets of her town; Mafia-orchestrated bullying threatened her entire family. Galli traced the dramatic tale to its conclusion, in spite of initial warnings from her own relatives not to break the Sicilian code of silence. Throughout her search for the enigmatic Franca, Galli shares her own poignant and hilarious observations about a vibrant culture steeped in contradictions and paradoxes. Does she succeed in locating the elusive proto-feminist whose case forever changed Italian culture and history? Travel along on Galli's engaging odyssey to find out.

Contenu
Prologue
Chapter I A Hot Pink Hell
Chapter II Packing
Chapter III Approach from the West
Chapter IV Arrival
Chapter V Venerdi Santo
Chapter VI Sabato Santo
Chapter VII Pasqua
Chapter VIII Easter Monday
Chapter IX The Garden
Chapter X The Vault
Chapter XI The Shoes Weekend
Chapter XII The National Library
Chapter XIII Ill Wind
Chapter XIV Summit Plea to Aphrodite
Chapter XV The Silent and the Loud
Chapter XVI The North Coast
Chapter XVII Ruins, Bureaucrats
Chapter XVIII Planning The Getaway
Chapter XIX Bilingual Bus Ride
Chapter XX Onward
Chapter XXI Wet Scirocco
Chapter XXII Scylla and Charybdis
Chapter XXIII Rescued
Chapter XXIV Will She Speak?
Italian - English Glossary
Appendix
Acknowledgments