Fausto Bassini, a publisher from Ferrara, describes to Nuova Ferrara two passport photos, in black and white, of Leonarda Cianciulli, the so-called ‘soapmaker of Correggio’, a serial killer accused of killing three women in the 1940s.
“In her last remaining image, despite it being taken in the hell of a criminal asylum and despite her mental illness being truly present in her at the time (unlike 24 years earlier, when at the trial she had cunningly simulated madness), appears paradoxically serene, devoid of suffering”.
The two photos, previously unpublished, published by the Ferrara newspaper, date back to 8 July 1970, just three months before he died.
They are contained in one of the numerous prison and clinical sub-files registered to Cianciulli, for a total of a thousand papers, found in 15 years of work by Bassini.
The woman is framed while looking at the camera, posing and even smiling. Her face is hollowed out by age and deep wrinkles, her hair is no longer dyed.
Unrecognizable compared to the images known so far.
Cianciulli died of a stroke at 2 am on 15 October 1970 after almost two days in a coma, in the “judicial asylum for women” in Pozzuoli (Naples), at the age of 76.
She found herself locked up there, continuing to serve a sentence from the Court of Assizes of Reggio Emilia for having deceived and killed three fellow villagers for the purpose of robbery between 1939 and 1940, in the apartment where the family lived in Correggio, and destroyed their bodies. to hide the traces “through saponification”, the judges wrote.
LEONARDA CIANCIULLI IN THE AVERSA OPG
The Aversa Criminal Asylum has hosted numerous characters, famous for different reasons.
Among the famous serial killers who made this structure famous, it is right to remember the case of Leonarda Cianciulli.
Cianciulli was born in Montella, in the province of Avellino in 1892, to Emilia di Nolfi and Mariano Cianciulli.
His was a difficult childhood. It is said that her beautiful mother, still 14 years old, had been forced by her parents to marry her husband, since he had kidnapped and raped her, Leonarda would then be born from her subsequent unwanted pregnancy.
Leonarda Cianciulli was an unhappy and sickly child who attempted suicide several times.
On 20 June 1946 Cianciulli was found guilty of the three murders, the theft of the victims’ property and the vilification of the corpses, and therefore sentenced to hospitalization for at least three years in a judicial mental hospital and thirty years of imprisonment.
The expert opinion of Professor Filippo Saporito, professor at the University of Rome and director of the Criminal Asylum of Aversa, manages to convince the jury only of the defendant’s mental semi-infirmity, following the theories of Cesare Lombroso, which were very popular at the time.
Interned for a long period in the Criminal Asylum of Aversa where she wrote her memoirs entitled: “The confessions of an embittered soul”, over seven hundred pages in which she narrated the murders and the dismemberment of the bodies, she crocheted and cooked biscuits that no one had the courage to taste.
