Love in the courtroom: The debate on crimes of passion in late nineteenth-century Italy

The aim of this chapter is to understand the role played by the emotion of love in the Italian criminal law during the second half of the Nineteenth century through the analysis of the debate on crimes of passion. At that time usually “the acts committed by momentum” were identified by legal scholars with three different interior states: cold blood substantially coincident with premeditation, the “state of passion”, due to a crime of passion, and the “state of anger”, which should be connected to provocation. Not surprisingly, the debate on the existence of “criminal of passions”, or rather, criminals motivated by strong passion like love or jealousy, was connected with the main problem of the old question of free will as the basis of imputability. In this sense, many legal scholars attempted to investigate whether the passionate offender was to be considered more or less dangerous than criminals not motivated by any emotional factors.