Italy gave the world Caravaggio, Verdi, and the sort of architecture that makes tourists weep into their gelato. A place of operas, cathedrals, couture, and cuisine. And yet, this week, its parliament passed a law more at home in a nation struggling with social collapse: a statute defining femicide, the intentional killing of a woman or girl because she is female, as a separate crime, punishable by life imprisonment. A country famous for worshipping its mothers and grandmothers is now reading out statistics that belong in a crime thriller. The vote was unanimous. Italy’s famously quarrelsome parliament suddenly agreed on something — the political equivalent of a taxi in Naples using a turn signal. Giorgia Meloni welcomed the law, calling it overdue. Few disagreed. Italy recorded 106 femicides in 2024, roughly one every three days. That’s a rhythm no civilized country should ever grow accustomed to. Especially not Italy, a nation that has spent centuries perfecting beauty only to find itself tallying bodies at a pace that would shame much poorer and less stable states. This forces a blunt, unavoidable question: why would a supposedly refined Western nation need a specific law for something so barbaric? Why must a country of galleries and grandmothers now legislate against the murder of women as if drafting instructions for a failing state? One thing is obvious: ordinary Italian men (and women) aren’t suddenly possessed by some murderous mania. The average Italian male is far more interested in football lineups, family lunches, and finding a stretch of sidewalk not colonized by Vespas. And yet the killings continue. That contradiction tells us the violence isn’t rising organically from Italian culture. Something else is colliding with it. For well over a decade, Italy has absorbed large waves of unchecked immigration, particularly from North Africa and parts of the Middle East — regions where violence against women is a grim routine. Countries like Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, and Libya repeatedly rank high for domestic violence, forced marriage, and gender-based killings. In many of these societies, often shaped by deeply traditional interpretations of Islam, “honor” dictates what women may do and “dishonor” is treated as an offense punishable by the family itself. Femicide there isn’t concealed. It’s treated as part of the moral order, not a violation of it. A daughter speaking to a boy her father disapproves of, a wife seeking divorce, a sister refusing a forced marriage — these are the decisions that can cost a woman her life. In Italy, these patterns don’t magically vanish at the border. A culture that normalizes male ownership doesn’t evaporate because someone has filed for asylum. A worldview shaped by the belief that a woman’s disobedience is a provocation doesn’t evaporate at the border or dissolve in a police queue. Add the shock of migration — poverty, humiliation, status turned to dust — and those old norms can grow even stronger. Just like people, norms travel. Customs cling. People don’t wash off their worldview in the Mediterranean Sea. Many arrivals come from regions where a woman’s independence is seen as an insult, where the idea of female autonomy threatens not just one man’s authority but the entire social order. When those men arrive in a country where women dress as they like, walk where they like, choose whom they love, and say “no” without hesitation, the cultural collision is destined to turn ugly. Italy is a nation shaped by Catholicism. Family loyalty may be loud and overbearing, but it has never carried the logic of blood punishment. Italian culture has many sins, but femicide as a moral duty isn’t one of them. The idea that a woman’s choices could stain a family’s name or demand violent “correction” has no roots in Rome, Naples, Florence, or anywhere else on the peninsula. That mindset is a foreign import, and Italy’s now paying the price for pretending all cultures treat women the same. Immigrant-perpetrated violence against women is disproportionately high. Over the last ten years, as migration surged, so did the numbers most politicians refuse to say aloud. Rape cases spiked, sexual assaults climbed, and the profile of offenders shifted in ways no amount of earnest speeches can hide. Cities like Milan, Turin, and Bologna have seen marked rises in attacks carried out by young men from North Africa and parts of the Middle East — men arriving from places where boundaries between “courtship” and coercion barely exist. Italian women report being harassed in parks, on public transport, outside nightclubs, and increasingly in small towns that once saw little more than petty theft. The new femicide law is Italy’s attempt to break that cycle. By naming the crime directly, the state is admitting that women are being targeted for a specific reason: because they are women living in a society that allows them choices unimaginable in the countries some perpetrators come from. Freedom, here, is the provocation. Autonomy, the insult. This is Italy, at last, telling the truth. A nation that spent centuries sculpting order and beauty can no longer ignore the violence now spreading through its streets and homes. But a law, however strong, cannot undo years of reckless policy. It can’t demand assimilation after years spent refusing to ask for it. It can’t fix the consequences of importing communities with profoundly different views on females, family, and social hierarchy. And so Italy now stands in a strange, shameful paradox. A country famous for worshipping its mothers and grandmothers is now reading out statistics that belong in a crime thriller. A nation built on family and fellowship is confronting a kind of brutality that feels torn from another century and imported into the present. The new law is necessary. It may even save lives. But unless Italy confronts the cultural roots of this crisis with the same honesty it finally showed in parliament, the measure will become another well-intentioned plaque on a wall that keeps cracking. READ MORE from John Mac Ghlionn: The Discipline Dividend: How Conservatives Defend What Liberals Dismantle A PSA to Women: This Type of Man Won’t Save You When It Counts The Hedge-Fund Arsonist Now Campaigning as California’s Savior