The Girl Who Said No

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.

Auteur

Natalie Galli is a writer of Sicilian background who was born and raised in San Francisco. She lives just north of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Rafael, California

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