Presence

On August 29, 1523, Margherita, known as Madregna, was accused of witchcraft. Tortured with rope, she was condemned and burned alive at the stake. Centuries later, her voice still echoes.

Between the 15th and 18th centuries, fear and superstition took deep root in cities and rural areas 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 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. Behind these accusations, however, lay far deeper cultural tensions concerning 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 irregular attendance at church, were considered suspicious. Their presence was seen as a threat to moral and spiritual order. This climate of paranoia, often fueled by local authorities and religious institutions, was not accidental but functioned 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 acts of maleficium but also to attending nocturnal sabbaths, making pacts with the devil, and belonging to secret sects. The aim was not only punishment but the extraction of confessions that reinforced the worldview of Church and State.

The foundations of these persecutions were laid in the fifteenth century with the circulation of the first demonological and witchcraft treatises. Among the most well known were the Malleus Maleficarum, published in 1487 by Heinrich Kramer with the help of Jacob Sprenger, the Formicarius by Johannes Nider, published in 1475, and De Lamiis et Phitonicis Mulieribus by Ulrich Molitor, published in 1489. These texts fused superstition with legal doctrine, presenting women who practiced witchcraft as a real and systemic threat to the Christian community.

Although men, children, and even clergy were sometimes accused, nearly two thirds of all witch trials involved women. Interrogations focused obsessively on their bodies, searching for devil’s marks, signs of corruption, or sexual deviance. The trials themselves were spectacles of suffering. While burning at the stake became the most infamous image of these executions, many victims were also beheaded, hanged, or died under torture. Punishments varied by region, but the underlying logic remained consistent: fear had to be made visible.

The spread of trials accelerated at the end of the fifteenth century and reached its peak between the late sixteenth and mid seventeenth centuries, before gradually declining. Enlightenment thought, changes in legal procedures, and growing skepticism toward religious institutions contributed to the end of the phenomenon. By the early eighteenth century, witch hunts had largely disappeared from Western Europe, though the devastation they caused left an enduring mark on collective memory.

Historians estimate that 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.

Yet the logic that fueled those persecutions did not disappear. 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, exercises autonomy, and resists control has always aroused suspicion. From witch hunts to psychiatric confinement, the punishment of women who disobey the established order continues into the present.

One of the most insidious crimes of Italian fascism was the systematic use of asylums to repress female behavior deemed transgressive. The regime enacted a modern return to a medieval logic. Women who did not conform to the fascist ideal of devoted wife and mother, those considered too exuberant, too independent, or physically unfit, were interned as threats to regime ethics. Emotional states such as fear, grief, or rebellion were pathologized into psychiatric diagnoses.

Mussolini’s government passed laws that removed women from public life, halving their wages in 1927, limiting access to higher education, and confining them to domestic roles. As Ferdinando Loffredo wrote in Politics of the Family in 1938, “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.”

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. For decades, psychiatric institutions continued to function as tools of social punishment. A diagnosis of “extremely bizarre behavior undoubtedly due to mental imbalance” was sufficient to confine a woman indefinitely.

This continued until 1978 with the implementation of Law 180, the Basaglia Law, which abolished asylums. Yet the unconscious legacy of male ownership over women’s bodies and will persisted. Only in 1981 was the crime of honor formally abolished from the Italian Penal Code.

Today, women enjoy greater rights in law and opportunity, yet resistance to this change persists in the form of physical and psychological violence, most visibly through femicide. For a woman who refuses to be a shadow of a man, whether as Adam’s rib or as the dutiful wife of the Fatherland, the story remains disturbingly similar from 1400 to 2025.

What is needed is a true social transition toward equality beyond gender. As always, women must save themselves not through symbols or superficial labels but by standing firmly on the ground of rights rather than identity. Only then can Medusa, the demonized matriarch, face Perseus not as a monster but without suffering her tragic beheading.

Every November 25th, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women is marked by a succession of numbers. This is necessary but profoundly insufficient. Established in 1999 by the United Nations in memory of Patria, Minerva, and María Teresa Mirabal, three activist sisters murdered on November 25, 1960, on the orders of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, the day aims to draw attention to a deeply rooted systemic problem.

Data published by Italy’s Ministry of the Interior reveal a disturbing continuity. The number of femicides shows no sign of decreasing. In 2021, 109 women were killed, 93 by partners, ex partners, or family members. While overall homicide rates decline, gender based violence remains an exception. These crimes are evenly distributed across the country, independent of geography, class, or cultural context. They are not isolated incidents but the product of a system that continues to tolerate violence.

A study of 211 femicide cases between 2017 and 2018 shows that only 29 victims had filed a report, and in more than half of those cases no protective measures were taken. Institutional failure, from law enforcement to the judiciary, emerges as the final link in a chain of systemic neglect.

Numbers alone are not enough. Statistics risk flattening individual suffering. Social decay does not explain everything. If the problem were only poverty or backwardness, progress would suffice, but it does not. A simple search for the words “burned alive” reveals dozens of recent cases of Italian women killed in ritualized acts of destruction aimed not only at the body but at symbolic erasure.

The list of names that follows does not form a statistic but carries immense symbolic weight. These are not random tragedies but echoes of an archaic and socially tolerated violence. The death of Margherita, burned alive in September 1523, still resonates in Italian history as a wound that time has failed to heal.