The Column – Human Styles
In 1960, Vittorio De Sica brought Alberto Moravia’s novel to the screen and did so through the extraordinary interpretation of Sophia Loren in the role of Cesira: the film La Ciociara tells the story of the escape from Rome in wartime, the hope of liberation, and then the violent wound of the assault on the two protagonists by troops – the “goumiers” – during the Allied advance in Lazio.
Between May and June 1944, in Ciociaria and other areas of central Italy, it is estimated that between 2,000 and 12,000 women, aged between eleven and eighty-six, were raped by colonial soldiers. Some sources also speak of over 800 men killed in the attempt to defend their wives and daughters.
An unprecedented mass violence, which has generated countless abortions and shattered the lives of women who were waiting for freedom.
A violence not so far from that of today, suffered in the mirage of a promised freedom but never really tasted.
In 1962 the film achieved historic recognition: Sophia Loren won the Oscar for best leading actress. Ciociara is not just a testimony to those facts: it is a still relevant warning on what sexual violence in war, loss of dignity, generational trauma means. In a sequence that has become famous, mother and daughter seek refuge and instead find devastation that no promised liberation can erase.
Today that theme resonates in a totally different context: no longer war with rifles, but with screens; no longer the body physically violated in a moment, but a body digitally exposed, manipulated, shared without consent. Women become open source images for algorithms that generate pornography, deepfakes, bodies that have not chosen to be used, files that cannot be deleted. Wounds that cannot be erased, caused to give pleasure to those who cannot find it without the abuse of others.
The victims of these sites are many, and the figures – where available – indicate a mass dimension that resembles collective violence. In Italy, the case of a site with over seven million users with access to images generated without consent has emerged in recent days: not only those who create, but also those who watch become part of the process. Every click is violence.
Thus the leap becomes tragic: from what happens in La Ciociara – women violated, abandoned, silenced – to the contemporary woman who finds herself “exposed”, “stolen” of her own image, without even an executioner to look in the face. Violence has changed form, but not substance: it is control, it is the denial of consent, it is the arbitrary use of the body – today in a media key – as an object.
And as in the film, where Cesira embodies not only her suffering but that of her daughter and an indefinite number of women, guilty only of being women, so today a further collective fabric is added: a society in which digital voyeurism, indistinct access, diffusion online generate wounds that still have no clear names. Trauma no longer takes place on film, but on servers.
The reference to “la Ciociara” therefore becomes double: on the one hand, a historical warning – do not forget the rapes, do not trivialize the war, do not let silence dilute the crime; on the other, a reminder of today — do not ignore the devastation against non-consenting, even conscious, female bodies. It is not enough to remove, hide or delete a web page. We need respect, a culture of consensus, individual responsibility. We need indignation.
Sophia Loren’s Oscar win — that worldwide recognition — reminds us that cinema can give a voice to those who have had none, it can show what history could forget. But now, being “mere” spectators of videos in which the face, known or unknown, of a woman is affixed to a body and made to move, speak, in hardcore images, is not enough to clear one’s conscience.
Every access, every image seen, is a precise choice that violates a person’s identity.
And if yesterday we won an Oscar against violence, today we have definitely lost it.
