This article analyzes Rossana Campo’s Mentre la mia bella dorme (1999), Duro come l’amore (2005) and Il posto delle donne (2013) in the context of Campo’s work in general, showing how her use of crime genre conventions is specifically designed to reveal flaws and pitfalls inherent in romance narratives. By establishing a complex dialogue between noir and rosa, and by offsetting both traditions with female protagonists who question in different ways the heterosexual paradigm, Campo’s crime novels occupy a unique place in her production, especially in regard to the representation of female desire.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Bernardi, C., (2025), "Murders in Shocking Pink: Women, Love and Desire in Rossana Campo’s Noir Fiction", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Quaderni d'italianistica

Original publication: Bernardi, Claudia. "Murders in Shocking Pink: Women, Love and Desire in Rossana Campo’s Noir Fiction." Quaderni d'italianistica 37 (1): 2017. 141-158. DOI: 10.33137/q.i..v37i1.28283. 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/.