BBC Learning English
Words in the News
21
st
October 2011
Black Widow ‘won't work for freedom’
Words in the News
© British Broadcasting Corporation 2011
Page 1 of 2
bbclearningenglish.com
A few hours of work seems a small price to pay for a taste of liberty. But one of Italy's most
infamous inmates, known as the Black Widow, has rejected an offer of work in exchange for
limited freedom. She was jailed for 29 years in 1998. Mark Duff reports:
Patrizia Reggiani once said she'd rather cry in a Rolls than be happy on a bicycle. She
doesn't seem to have changed her mind.
Dubbed the Black Widow after she was jailed for ordering the murder of her ex-husband, the
heir to the Gucci family fortune, Ms Reggiani has spent most of the past 13 years at San
Vittore prison in Milan.
Judges had offered her the chance of day release, if she agreed to take a job outside the prison
walls. But Ms Reggiani, who's 63, was having none of it. She'd never worked in her life, she
told the judges, and she didn't intend to start now.
Her trial in 1998 attracted worldwide interest. It had everything: a woman betrayed by the
man she'd loved and the low-life murder of the heir to a multi-million dollar fashion fortune.
For now, though, Patrizia Reggiani, who once complained that her allowance of more than
US$630,000 a year wasn't enough to live on, will return to the comfort of her pet ferret and
her plants in her cell at San Vittore.
Mark Duff, BBC News, Milan
