Conclusion

Opening with an instruction issued just days after the Fadda trial by Italy’s Minister of Justice about ‘emotional management’ of legal spaces, the book’s conclusion reinforces the notion of courts of law as emergent emotional arenas in Liberal Italy. Although the court is the most concrete of emotional arenas to be explored by this book, the conclusion returns to the ways in which documents brought together by the prosecution’s investigation provided the historiographical means to extend the notion outward to less exceptional elements of life, love, and death in 1870s Italy. These rich sources not only shone light on unfamiliar aspects of Italian social history, they illuminated historical processes of emotional encounter, negotiation, navigation, experiment, management, and evolution, within a range of distinctive social spaces, mostly real, but some imagined or virtual. A brief epilogue summarizes what is known of the fates of the three accused in the trial for Giovanni Fadda’s murder.