This article considers a little-known type of gialli: those staged by all-women casts in educational theatre performances in Italy between the early 1940s and the early 1960s. It shows how the Salesian priests and sisters who authored educational gialli focused not so much on identifying and punishing the culprits as on proving the innocence of previously suspected characters and restoring those who had strayed from the right path. The article looks at both professional and amateur female detectives of Salesian gialli, their credentials for being called to solve a mystery, and their investigative techniques and success rate. It claims that the amateur detectives on the Salesian stage were often characterized as comical or incompetent, while the professional detectives, even though they were more successful, were foreign and unfeminine, concluding that Salesian authors often exploited the popularity of the giallo genre to put forward conservative role models for young women on the stage and in the audience.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Cavallaro, D., (2025), "Female Detectives in 1950s Salesian Educational Theatre", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Quaderni d'italianistica

Original publication: Cavallaro, Daniela. "Female Detectives in 1950s Salesian Educational Theatre." Quaderni d'italianistica 37 (1): 2017. 35-54. DOI: 10.33137/q.i..v37i1.28277. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Quaderni d'italianistica. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Quaderni d'italianistica under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.