Wilma, the only innocent one

Italian history is marked by crimes that have made history and that have filled the news for months, or even years. Let's think of the Cogne crime or the Erba massacre, which has recently returned to the attention of the media. In the black and white Italy of the 1950s, the “ Montesi case ” aroused the interest of a nation that was still licking its wounds from the Second World War. Yes, “Montesi case”, a neutral expression, somewhere between legal and journalistic, but which does not do justice to the unfortunate protagonist of an event that shook the halls of power more than seventy years ago. Wilma Montesi - this is the name of our tragic heroine - today finds her rightful place on the stage of history and crime news in Wilma (il Saggiatore, 2024, pp. 528, also e-book), the novel that Silvia Cassioli dedicated to her .

A novel that is also a docu-fiction, in which by stitching together the statements of witnesses and suspects, journalistic investigations and interrogations, Silvia Cassioli tries to unravel through writing a story that so morbidly fascinated her contemporaries that they lost the desire to seek the truth, preferring to drink in ambiguities, suspicions, conspiracy theories and gratuitous prejudices.

Cassioli instead relies on the facts, starting with what started the whole affair. On April 11, 1953, on the beach of Torvajanica, about forty kilometers from Rome, the body of a young woman was found lying on the sand. Her name was Wilma Montesi, a twenty-one-year-old girl, described as having “some vague cinematic aspirations” in the chronicles of the time. On the surface it seemed to have been an unfortunate accident, the result of a slightly out-of-season swim that ended badly.

Too many things, however, did not add up, even if the investigators were strongly inclined to close the case quickly, out of laziness or perhaps out of a fear, quite well-founded, of stirring up a hornet's nest. In any case, some diligent public safety officials and some journalists began to investigate among the victim's circle of friends and acquaintances: people from the world of entertainment, justice and even politics, starting with Piero Piccioni, son of the vice president of the Council, the Christian Democrat Attilio Piccioni. But soon the story was joined by regular figures from the salons of wealthy Rome, ambiguous characters such as Anna Maria Moneta Caglio, called by the newspapers "the Black Swan" and the daughter of a wealthy Milanese family seeking fame in Cinecittà. Together with her was the Marquis Ugo Montagna, in whose estates orgies were apparently held in which even very famous people participated.

These are the co-protagonists who gradually took the center stage from Wilma in a tangle of morbidity and distortion, impunity and suffering, in which the event - the death of a young woman - became less important than the fictionalized story and the judgment it was covered in. Cassioli, with his book, tries in a certain sense to rewind the tape to make us understand where he went wrong, what magistrates, policemen, journalists and ordinary people failed. His is the attempt to reconstruct through a mosaic of voices the figure of a girl treated for too long as a simple simulacrum, the victim of a crime without culprits and reduced to material for scandal articles. It is the attempt to free her from her destiny as an extra when instead she had every right first of all to live and then to receive mercy and justice. In fact, we do not know for sure who killed her, we do not even know why, assuming it makes sense to know. We know that Wilma was innocent, probably the only human being without guilt in a petty, vulgar, unscrupulous affair.