The Circeo Massacre

Two young women from Rome

Rosaria Lopez was 19 and Donatella Colasanti was 17 when they accepted an invitation in late September 1975 from young men they had met only days earlier through a mutual acquaintance, who investigators later found had no part in what followed. The three men who would be convicted, Angelo Izzo, then about 20, Gianni Guido, 19, and Andrea Ghira, 22, came from comfortable families in the affluent Parioli district and openly identified with the neo-fascist right. Izzo already had a 1974 conviction for a rape committed with two friends; the sentence of two and a half years had been suspended, and the judge had noted that the defendants came from excellent families.

What happened at San Felice Circeo

On 29 September 1975 the women were taken to Villa Moresca, a house owned by the Ghira family at San Felice Circeo, a seaside resort on the Lazio coast roughly 100 kilometres south of Rome. Over the following day and a half, reported as about 30 to 35 hours, they were held captive and subjected to sustained abuse, including sexual violence. Rosaria Lopez was killed. Donatella Colasanti survived only because she pretended to be dead. The men put both women in the boot of a car belonging to Guido's father and drove back to Rome, leaving the car parked in the city's Trieste district. Late that night a passer-by heard sounds coming from the boot and called the police, who found Colasanti alive beside her friend's body.

Arrests and a fugitive

Izzo and Guido were arrested within hours. Ghira was never caught. Prosecutors suspected that he had been warned and helped to escape. It later emerged that he spent several months on a kibbutz in Israel and then, in June 1976, enlisted in the Spanish Foreign Legion under the false name Massimo Testa de Andrés. He served for many years before being discharged because of drug addiction, and he died in the Spanish enclave of Melilla on 2 September 1994. His identity was revealed only about a decade later, and a DNA test in 2005 identified the body buried in Melilla as Ghira. Colasanti never accepted that he was dead. Doubts persisted, and in January 2016, after a television report, an Italian court ordered the remains exhumed so they could be re-examined with newer DNA techniques.

The 1976 trial

The trial opened in spring 1976 and became a national event. Colasanti testified against the men and was represented by the lawyer Tina Lagostena Bassi. Feminist groups attended the hearings, demonstrated in several cities and, for the first time, were admitted as civil parties in a criminal trial. Defence lawyers attacked Colasanti's credibility and suggested the women had brought the violence on themselves, arguments that drew wide protest. On 29 July 1976 the court sentenced all three men, Ghira in his absence, to life imprisonment. On appeal, Izzo's and Ghira's life sentences were upheld, while Guido's was reduced to 30 years after he expressed remorse and his family paid the Lopez family 100 million lire; the Lopez family then withdrew as a civil party.

Escapes, release and new killings

Guido escaped from prison in Italy, was arrested in Buenos Aires, escaped again, and was finally caught in Panama in 1994 and extradited to Italy. He was placed on probation with social services in 2008, and a year later a sentence reduction under a general pardon brought his sentence to an end. Izzo became a prison informant on far-right violence. In December 2004 he was granted semi-liberty while held in Campobasso, and in late April 2005 he killed Maria Carmela Linciano and her daughter Valentina Maiorano in Ferrazzano, Molise, the wife and daughter of a former Sacra Corona Unita member turned informant. Sources give the date as 25 or 28 April. He received a second life sentence and is held in Velletri prison. Colasanti died of cancer in Rome on 30 December 2005.

Why the case still matters

The Circeo case is remembered as a turning point in how Italy talked about violence against women. Feminist collectives argued that such violence was structural and cut across social classes, opened anti-violence centres and pursued a courtroom strategy aimed at changing the rape law. At the time the penal code treated rape as an offence against public morality rather than against the person; that classification changed only in 1996, after a long campaign. The Izzo semi-liberty decision also had legal consequences: in 2009 the European Court of Human Rights found that Italy had violated the right to life of his two Ferrazzano victims and ordered compensation of 45,000 euros to their relatives.

Recent developments

The fiftieth anniversary in 2025 brought renewed attention. In May 2025 Izzo, answering questions through his lawyer for a public broadcaster's podcast, said he now regarded himself as a different person and would not repeat his crimes. Coverage around the anniversary in September 2025 revisited the trial and the feminist movement it helped to energise.