The female home district of Pozzuoli is hosted inside an ancient fifteenth century convent fonded by friars minor. Over the centuries the old building was restored by Don Pedro of Toledo, after the earthquake of 1538 and it had different uses: it was brotherhood of sailors and fishermen, a cemetery area and summer residence of the diocesan seminary. In the convent lived his last months a great musician, Giambattista Pergolesi ( he died very young in the 1736). Only after the Unity the convent was finally intended as penitentiary. History, ancient melodies, humanity: this is the air who it’s still possible breathing inside its walls. 

In Italy the number of female detainees in prisons it’s about the 5% of the total. They live restricted in 1 of the 5 female institute (Trani, Pozzuoli, Roma Rebibbia, Empoli and Venezia Giudecca) or in one of the 52 departments present inside male prisons. Their stories are often poorly understood and for a large part of them, sons are the most painful chapter. Today are more than a hundred the child who live behind bars with their mothers. “When i entered in jail my son had 11 months” tells Gabriella, “inside the prison he quickly learned to be inmate, from the tone -“Please officer could you open me? – “Mom , when we have the interview with the lawyer?”- to the search -“He opened alone his harms and legs beside the officer”.
The prison also means detachment from own social reality, and the women are affected more roughly than men. Despite a lot of psychological and physical pressures due to the everyday life inside a prison (from a forced cohabitation inside cells often too small, to the moments of loneliness, anger, sadness and dispair) woman than man can preserve her status, keeping those habits, gestures and that everyday life which albeit played in a different reality, can assure and calm and maybe also deceive them that all that they are feeling and living it’s just a little brief which divides them to the home coming.
Type of crimes committed by women is a clear expression of a marginality’s path which often marks their lives, bringing them in jail for short and repeated stays: drugs shop and property crimes are indeed the main reason of sentence condemnation for the overwhelming majority of female inmates. Basically the female prison population is convicted to not very long sentences, excluding of course convictions for murder often realized by all those woman who lived years of domestic violence.
In “Asylum” Goffman writes:
“It is very widespread the feeling between inmates that time spent behind the bars is wasted, useless and stolen from his own life; it deals of a time that has to be deleted: it’s about something that has to be past or marked, or quicked or delayed”.