Tuesday, Dec 22, 2020 • 15min
The Nun's Tale (Short)
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This is an episode about a literal s**t eating nun. Enjoy.
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Simon Whistler
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Simon Whistler
00:30
Hello everybody. Welcome back to a brand new episode of The Casual Criminalist. I as always am your host Simon and not as always we're trying something a little bit different in this episode. This is what I am calling a Casual Criminalist shorts which if you couldn't tell from the name is a short version of The Casual Criminalist.
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00:47
I've had everyone's favourite script writer Callum put together a short Casual Criminalist piece. Generally these are pieces that I felt didn't quite have enough information to be fleshed out into a full episode. So we're starting with The
nun's
Tale: Sister Virginia Maria.Share
01:04
Just before we get into it I will say that if you are listening to this in its podcast form. Hello there, please do consider leaving a fantastic review for this podcast or a negative review if you just don't like it, but then why are you listening?
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01:19
Also if you are watching this on YouTube or wherever you get videos then do consider smashing that like button and let's just jump in shall we?
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01:35
We all like a good story, even true crime fans. I think particularly true crime fans. I think the story is already makes these stories come alive. Does that make sense?
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01:46
The only difference is that the sort of romantic yarns that likely suit your slightly depraved tastes aren’t exactly fairy tales. Well actually, they are like fairy tales. The original blood-and-guts versions. Oh yeah, fairytales like told by Disney, way less gruesome than the-
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01:59
Isn't the original Snow White, she gets raped while she's sleeping by the king or something and has the baby and doesn't even remember. and I'm like, "Whoa, the old fairy tales, way more rape, way more murder"! And as Callum says, way more blood and guts.
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02:15
Rather than the Disney re-spins, Callum and I, same page. If that sounds like your idea of a proper romance then you’re in luck. In our very first Casual Criminalist short, we’re going to be looking at one of the strangest, goriest and most disgusting love stories from history.
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02:30
One of the most disgusting things I remember is something actually covered on another YouTube channel I run called Today I Found Out where we covered the case of a man who basically makes like a model of this woman and then it has, it's like made with her bones. It is horrible and maybe we could cover it. If people tell me, Simon cover the weird story about the man with his bones, I will. Maybe that's a longer piece though, anyway.
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02:53
It takes place, as many of the great love stories do, in Italy.
Milan
, to be precise. The year is 1575, and a local banking family has just added a newborn girl to their numbers. Her name was Marianna de Levya y Marino and I apologise to my Italian pronunciation. I'm not Italian, could you tell? Despite being from a wealthy family little Marianna didn’t have the easiest upbringing.Share
03:16
Her mother died of the plague before she was old enough to understand and her father, the cold and uncaring Earl of
Monza
, was largely absent as he tended to his investments around the continent. After a tumultuous upbringing in the care of her aunt, overshadowed by a long and unsuccessful lawsuit for her maternal inheritance, Marianna was shipped off to a nunnery at the age of thirteen. That was just the done thing back in the day if you couldn’t be bothered with a kid. Just send them to the clergy, they’re no longer your problem.Share
03:44
Despite the surprise twist in her life trajectory, Marianna’s time a servant of God was quite pleasant in the beginning. Her convent was actually in the town of
Monza
, a picturesque place just a short distance to the northeast of Milano. Marianna took on a new name after her consecration in 1591, picking the incredibly predictable Sister Virginia Maria which must be the nun
equivalent of "John Smith". Indeed.Share
04:07
And for the rest of her teens, Sister Virginia had a pretty good lifestyle. She made friends easily, read often, and she became a well-liked political figure in
Monza
, known as a model nun
. By the end of her holy career however, she would be known for messing pretty much every aspect of her religious duties up in the worst ways imaginable. Why, you ask? Well, when our heroine reached the tender age of twenty two, she fell in love. I'm very curious as to where this is going.Share
04:33
I mean, as we know well from The Casual Criminals, people who have difficult upbringings and are abandoned by their parents or one of the parents dies and then you're abandoned by the father. You know, I'd say that makes up a disproportionate number of the criminals we cover on this show.
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04:48
The object of her affections was a local Casanova called
Giovanni Paolo Osio
who lived in a townhouse right next to the monastery. Pretty much an archetypal wealthy bad boy, Gian Paolo
, I guess that's sort for Giovanni, who knew, had been accused of murdering a tax collector in the past. He was later pardoned, but still, this was not the sort of guy who the locals wanted their daughters going anywhere near. Yeah, I mean normally when you describe a bad boy it's like, I don't know, he drives a car that is too fast and this one knows a murderer. Anyway.Share
05:22
Apparently he had grown tired of seducing his fellow aristocrats, and sought more of a challenge. Competing against The Almighty himself for kicks. So he set his sights on the young sister, after seeing her working at the girl’s school attached to the convent which he was apparently in the habit of watching from his window.
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05:39
It all started out innocently enough, with the two exchanging letters using a rope dropped down from one of the monastery windows. Eventually though, they decided to take things to the next level. Being from a rich family, Sister Virginia had enough influence around town to bring a few of the other nuns onto her side, and Signor Osio’s priest buddy Father Arrigone also helped keep things under wraps. Why?
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06:02
They had a blacksmith copy the keys to the doors, and
Gian Paolo
used them regularly to sneak in and spend the night with Sister Virginia. So much for being a model nun
. That went downhill quickly! In case any of our listeners aren’t familiar at all with the Catholic
faith, abstinence is basically the golden rule for monks and nuns.Share
06:19
Look, I don't know much about the
Catholic
faith but I do know that nuns can't have sex. That is like, yeah, it's one of the keys as Callum says. Which is why Sister Virginia was thrown into such a crisis by her perfectly normal human behaviour.Share
06:34
I mean, yeah, I mean being a
nun
, it doesn't seem like a normal human behaviour. I mean, I don't imagine there are too many nuns watching this true crime show but, I mean, is a bit weird isn't it? I mean nothing she’s done so far warrants any condemnation, but it was the way she dealt with this inner t- wait!Share
06:50
Isn't condemnation even a religious word, it sounds like she would definitely be condemned by God. She's done the least Nun-y thing of all Nun-y things other than maybe murder and maybe we're getting to murder. But it was the way she dealt with this inner turmoil that won her a place in the history books under the chapter. "Oh my God, that's -ing disgusting".
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07:07
See, Sister Virginia decided that the best way to conquer her bodily urges wasn’t prayer. It was, I mean, there’s no sugarcoating it here. She ate
Gian Paolo’s
faeces. Yes, her Clockwork Orange-esque logic was that if she could overpower her lust with pure, total disgust, then she would be able to avoid sleeping with him ever again. Obviously she's never seen two girls one cup!Share
07:31
I should add that modern therapists do not recommend this method for getting over your ex. No sh-t! The tried and true method of silently weeping yourself to sleep for months is much more effective than literal shit-munching. Which is precisely what Sister Virginia discovered. Her methods were as ineffective as they were insane.
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07:50
Yeah, I mean, unquestionably both of those things, like, what is- Although I don't know, maybe she's like. "Yeah, no, now he disgusts me because I know what his shit tastes like". But still this is not right. Definitely not right.
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08:03
Also, I mean you're going to get- I've seen that human centipede movie, which is very bizarre and horrible, but I'm pretty sure you can get some terrible infections from eating other people's shit and this is what, the 16th century? There's not antibiotics for hundreds of years. You're kind of screwed if you get an infection. Anyway, moving on.
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08:22
So the lovers continued on with their trysts, and Sister, this got significantly more weird, Sister Virginia ended up falling pregnant twice. In 1602 her first baby was stillborn. Then in 1603 she gave birth to a healthy daughter who was snuck off to live in the house of
Gian Paolo
and officially recognised as his illegitimate kid. That sounds like an oxymoron, "officially illegitimate", a few years later.Share
08:43
By this point the townspeople basically knew who the mother was, but it was only discussed in hushed whispers.
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08:49
Perhaps because of these extra-scandalous developments, the consciences of their co-conspirators eventually decided to stir up trouble. In 1606 one of the other nuns decided she’d had enough, possibly to save her own skin from God’s wrath. She threatened to drag the whole affair out of the shadows which would likely have had some pretty severe consequences back in 17th century Italy.
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09:11
I'm sorry, 17th century, but still, we're hundreds of years away from antibiotics. Did I say 17th century. Okay, yeah, this story started in the 1500s, late 1500s and moved into the 1600s. It's all making sense. But you see this would have likely involved chains and fire or something along those lines. Yeah, I mean, use your imagination.
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09:33
But see, prison wasn’t exactly
Gian Paolo’s
thing so he silenced the nun
in the only way he could. He killed her with a crowbar to the head, and had two of the other nuns hide her in a chicken coop. Sister Virginia wasn’t just an innocent bystander either. She was responsible for making sure that all the other nuns kept their mouths shut, lest they meet the same fate. Suddenly the monastery was looking a lot more like a prison block than a house of God. So even in a house of God, the same age old rules apply. Snitches get stitches.Share
10:01
Or murdered and put in a chicken coop. I don't know why they decided to put her in the chicken coop? I heard if you put them in the pig pen. Wasn't there some famous mobster who got rid of all the bodies by feeding them to the pigs? Or is this just some movie reference that I'm not going to get because as everyone will always point out in the comments, that I have not seen movies.
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10:19
I've seen Goodfellas, I think. I've not seen The Godfather, but someone was definitely feeding the bodies to pigs because they're really good at destroying bodies. There you go, a useful facts for the future.
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10:29
But the two lovers were on edge now, unsatisfied that their threats of violence would be enough to cover their tracks. So not only the snitch got stitches, but also the poor blacksmith who had forged the keys.
Gian Paolo
even tried hiring an assassin to shoot the town herbalist who had sold the nun
some medicines used for old-timey abortions. Lovely!Share
10:47
It’s likely that adding to their body count harmed their case rather than helped it, because word slowly made it through to the top brass in
Milan
, the governor himself. In 1607 he ordered an investigation into the murders and surrounding rumours, which led to the arrest of Gian Paolo
, Sister Virginia and all those who aided them in their decade-long binge of sin.Share
11:06
Yeah, I mean now you've got a lot more people to kill to cover this up. It's beginning to get to the point where it's not really going to work out. Many of them were subjected to, or threatened with, the aforementioned chains and fire, tortured until they spun the same gruesome yarn which I’ve just outlined for you, albeit with far more screaming and repenting than in my version.
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11:24
Gian Paolo
caught a lucky break as he was able to escape from captivity, avoiding the death penalty which was dished out to him in his absence. But what the courts couldn’t carry out, one of his friends managed to do instead. His host had Gian Paolo
stabbed to death in his basement. His head was taken to the local governor, while his body was walled into a niche in the palace. What's with hiding bodies in weird places. Where his headless ghost is said to wander to this day, presumably looking for women to hit on like a spectral Joey from Friends. "How you doin'"? He would say it in like old Italian, you know.Share
11:56
And our anti-heroine, the
nun
with questionable dietary choices was sentenced to life behind bricks. Yes bricks, not bars. She was to spend the rest of her days in a tiny, bricked-off room which was just 3.3 metres square. Her defence in court was basically that Satan made her do it. She didn’t quite phrase it like that, but the gist was that evil forces had placed unescapable urges inside her, so she wasn’t acting on her own volition. That’s a shaky defence at best, but probably held a lot more water back in the olden-time religious courts than it would nowadays.Share
12:24
Yeah. I don't imagine many people are in court nowadays being like "God made me do it". "The devil got inside me". Alright!
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12:31
So after serving thirteen years of her sentence, Sister Virginia was judged to be sufficiently repentant and reformed to return to her holy service, although who knows what thirteen years of solitary confinement did to her already quirky psychology. At any rate, she became known in godly circles as a model of repentance and wrote a series of letters instructing young nuns on how to deal with their earthly impulses.
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12:53
It probably didn't have to do with- she probably didn't recommend just eating shit. That didn't work out for her at all. These now sit alongside other classics such as OJ Simpson’s "Guide to Marital Bliss", and Charles Bronson’s "Practical Anger Management", in the "Do As I Say, Not As I Do" self-help section.
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13:12
So there you have it. A story of lust, murder, love and some disgusting other stuff which I don't want to bother repeating. Although she’s not the most sympathetic character, I think it’s worth asking, to what extent was Sister Virginia herself a victim here? Our humble crime podcast isn’t the first bit of media to explore the idea.
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13:30
In his 1840 novel
The Betrothed
, Italian writer Alessandro Manzoni
made a case in her defence. His literary version of the famous nun
dropped all of the fecal details, and portrayed her instead as a mistreated and innocent girl, starved of parental affection and manipulated by a sadistic playboy.Share
13:47
I mean, she was definitely starved of affection and it does seem like she was manipulated by the statistic playboy who just wanted to seduce a
nun
.Share
13:55
So, do we buy that? Well, not really, I don’t think. In reality, Virginia got her hands far more dirty, in more ways than one, than that sanitised account would have us believe. And with that final judgment, I’ll let you go so you can try and get the images from the past ten minutes out of your head.
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14:08
Peace be with you. Amen.
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14:10
Very nice ending Callum. That is the first ever episode of a Casual Criminalist short. Let me know what you think of it. Do you like these short ones? Obviously these are just in addition to the regular longer episodes where I found something on the internet and I was like, "Let's do that but it wasn't enough material". It's a Casual Criminalist short.
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14:25
Please let me know what you think. If you're listening to this as a podcast, leave a review. If you're watching on Youtube, smash that like button, all of that other stuff. Thanks for watching. Or listening if you're listening.
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