The brutal serial killings of eight young couples in a case that has come to be known as the “monster of Florence” remains Italy’s most riveting crime spree, 40 years after the last murder.
Over the decades, the case has fueled countless lurid headlines as a succession of more than a dozen men were accused, and in some cases jailed, by investigators convinced that the “monster” had finally been caught. Along the way, there were rumors of satanic cults, secret societies and a vindictive ex-wife who said she had seen body parts in her husband’s fridge.
With every arrest, public opinion was divided — many proclaimed a suspect’s guilt, many, their innocence. To this day, an animated crew of true crime enthusiasts — the so-called mostrologi — swap arcane details and conspiracy theories about the case on document-rich blogs. And by one expert’s count, at least 126 books have been written about the killings.
There have even been four convictions, but so many doubts remain that many Italians believe that the real killer has not been caught — an uncertainty that adds intrigue to “The Monster of Florence,” a four-part limited drama series that comes to Netflix on Wednesday.
Each episode tells the story of a man who at one point in time investigators believed was the killer. Narratively, it’s gripping. And, as in real life, it’s hard to know which evidence is conclusive.
“They’re good plot twists,” said Stefano Sollima, the series’ director and co-author, adding, “Our ambition was to tell a very complicated story without taking a position.”
The series is among the numerous true-crime tales generating buzz on the streaming services, including “Monster: The Ed Gein Story,” which premiered on Netflix this month as part of Ryan Murphy’s anthology series that has already dissected Jeffrey Dahmer (pun intended) and the Menendez brothers.
But “The Monster of Florence” has a societal aspect, too: It offers a snapshot of Italy during the late 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, a period of economic boom and cultural change that skipped over some pockets of the nation, as the poverty and wretchedness of the series’ characters suggest.
While Italy was being swept by the winds of “feminism and sexual liberalization, the countryside remained a patriarchal peasant society where men dominated in the family as fathers and husbands, and women had a subordinate role,” Sollima said. That tension, he offered, may have created the conditions “in which a monster was born.”
The series begins with the story of Stefano Mele, an uneducated Sardinian construction laborer in Tuscany who was convicted of killing his wife, Barbara Locci, and her lover, Antonio Lo Bianco, in 1968, years before a killing spree between 1981 and 1985 that took 12 lives. Another double homicide took place in 1974.
Investigators say the same gun was used in all eight double murders.
The episodes follow a line of inquiry known as the Sardinian lead. One features Mele’s brother Giovanni, while the other two feature Francesco and Salvatore Vinci, brothers who were both Locci’s lovers.
All four men were violent to women, the series shows. But the Sardinian lead was eventually dismissed, and investigators turned to a purportedly secret sect in Perugia for their villain, and then to an excitable Tuscan farm laborer and his entourage of friends.
Many of the suspects over the years “were not very convincing,” said Francesco Cappelletti, a researcher who served as chief consultant for the series, and being linked to the case caused huge turmoil in those people’s lives. The release of facial composites created havoc, he said, and one man died by suicide.
“Paradoxically, from the outset, there have been more victims of the justice system than victims of the Monster of Florence, because since 1968 a huge number of people have been thrown into a sort of investigative meat grinder,” Cappelletti said.
By presenting an array of suspects, the series also raises eyebrows about Italy’s judicial system and investigative abilities. Sollima and Lorenzo Mieli, the series producer, said that was not their intent, but the theme of injustice and investigative errors “is felt very strongly in Italy,” Mieli said.
Mieli also produced “Portobello,” an Italian original production for HBO Max, that is scheduled to debut in 2026. That series features the legal travails of Enzo Tortora, who at one point was Italy’s most famous television presenter. After being arrested in 1983 on accusations that he was a member of the Neapolitan camorra criminal organization, he was convicted two years later — only to later be acquitted of all charges. In Italy, the case is considered one of the most glaring cases of judicial injustice.
The director of “Portobello,” Marco Bellocchio, said he’d sought to capture the “heartache, tremendous anger and utter astonishment” of a regular man caught up in a “Kafkian tale.” Media frenzy was also to blame, said Stefano Bises, one of the show’s writers. The story is “super contemporary,” he said.
Both “The Monster of Florence” and “Portobello” are “very Italian stories that have universal aspects,” Mieli said.
“If you think, ‘Thank goodness we have law and order,’ and then they make a wrongful arrest, well, then there are no certainties,” he said, adding that Tortora’s arrest was on the scale of accusing Oprah Winfrey of leading a Colombian cartel. “Everyone would say, ‘What!’ — but instead here it happened.”
In the case of the “Monster of Florence,” Cappelletti’s personal stash of case-related lore ran to 120 gigabytes, “and the only objective facts are the eight double murders,” he said, adding, “All the rest is vague and very uncertain.”
The case still isn’t closed. Two prosecutors in Florence recently ordered the exhumation of a Vinci brother for a DNA comparison. And the nephew of one of the convicted men has asked for a review of his uncle’s case.
“I don’t know if the ‘monster’ was ever caught, or if investigators got close to him but didn’t know,” Sollima said. “I think our approach saved us — not to embrace one theory, but to narrate them all.”
Elisabetta Povoledo is a Times reporter based in Rome, covering Italy, the Vatican and the culture of the region. She has been a journalist for 35 years.
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