This article provides an interdisciplinary, reflective analysis of Pietro Pacciani (1925–1998), widely constructed as the principal suspect in the “Monster of Florence” murders (1968–1985). It examines how Pacciani was produced as both a juridical subject and a cultural symbol, situating this process within scholarship on criminality, deviance, and the figure of the “human monster” (Foucault, 1974–75). The central claim is that the enduring plausibility of Pacciani’s guilt cannot be explained solely through individual biography, but through the institutional and representational conditions that enabled a particular narrative of culpability to stabilise despite persistent contradictions culminating in a systematic characterisation of a carnivalesque ‘foolery’. But was he really so? Methodologically, the study combines close reading and contextual analysis of legal records with comparative analysis of literary and journalistic sources and Italian media coverage, especially based on materials never translated in English. This triangulation enables a rigorous account of how courtroom procedures, investigative logics, and media economies interacted to consolidate a public “myth” of Pacciani—one organised around an ambivalent repertoire of stupidity and cunning. Rather than treating “foolery” as a personal trait, the article conceptualises it as a systemic narrative device that both concealed and revealed investigative error, institutional (in)competence, and political pressures. By repositioning Pacciani as a paradoxical figure—simultaneously scapegoat, folk-devil, and diagnostic mirror—the article contributes to criminological and cultural-sociological debates on moral panic, evidentiary uncertainty, and the social production of evil in late twentieth-century Italy. It also demonstrates how these interpretive frameworks persist in contemporary true-crime formats (podcasts, docuseries), where older moral economies are reactivated for global audiences.
Janos Mark Szakolczai (Sun,) studied this question.