The Catholic School

In 2016, Albinati (Coming Back: Diary of a Mission to Afghanistan) won the Strega Prize, Italy’s most prestigious literary award, for the novel La scuola cattolica. Thanks to Shugaar, we now have an English translation. The story centers on a grisly account of the 1975 Circeo Massacre, in which three men raped, tortured, and murdered two women at their family’s Italian villa. The men graduated from Istituto San Leone Magno, the same elite Catholic school Albinati attended, and lived in the same upper-middle-class neighborhood, Quartiere Trieste. A blend of semiautobiographical remembrance, police documents, and fictional accounts, the sprawling narrative unfolds in a series of dialectical vignettes about good and evil, wealth and poverty, and masculinity and femininity. The Catholic school stands as a cultural totem, providing a contradictory understanding of these societal elements through structured hierarchy and blind duty. This is not a tale of moralizing or understanding but more an illumination of the disparate aspects of Italian society that coalesced to produce this brutal form of toxic masculinity.