by AGNES DIONISIO
Abstract
On June 22, 2024, the coastal town of Stintino in Sardinia, Italy, became home to the first “Statue of Peace” (“comfort women” memorial) installed in Italy. This paper examines how this Korean memorial reached a small town of 1,600 residents, analyzing the local actors involved, community responses, and ensuing tensions. Based on fieldwork conducted in May–June 2025, including interviews with Mayor Rita Limbania Vallebella and project initiator Rosamaria Caiazza, the study shows how a retired teacher’s interest in Korean culture aligned with a feminist mayor’s commitment to combating gender violence, creating a powerful alliance for historical memory and women’s rights.
Introduction
In the crystalline waters off Sardinia’s northwestern coast, where the Mediterranean meets the shores of Stintino, stands an unexpected monument to historical memory and women’s rights. The bronze figure of a young Korean girl seated on a chair, her clenched fists and bare feet telling a story of resilience in the face of unimaginable suffering, has become both a symbol of solidarity and a source of diplomatic tension. This is Italy’s first “Statue of Peace” (??? ???, pyeonghwaui sonyeosang), a memorial to the victims of the Japanese Empire’s military sexual slavery system euphemistically known as “comfort women.”
The statue’s presence in Stintino—a town of barely 1600 winter residents known primarily for its pristine beaches and tourism—raises compelling questions about how transnational memory travels, how local communities engage with distant historical traumas, and how grassroots activism can challenge state-level diplomatic relations. This article traces the remarkable journey that brought this Korean memorial to an Italian fishing village, examining the key actors, community responses, and ongoing controversies that have made Stintino an unlikely site of international memory politics.
The story begins not with diplomatic negotiations or institutional initiatives but with the friendship between two women: Rosamaria Caiazza, a retired elementary school teacher from Sassari who fell in love with Korean culture, and Rita Limbania Vallebella, Stintino’s first female mayor and a lawyer dedicated to combating gender violence and defending human rights. Their collaboration transformed a small Sardinian town into a focal point for debates about historical justice, women’s rights, and the politics of memory in the contemporary Mediterranean.
Literature review, methodology, and contribution to the field
Situating the study within existing scholarship
The euphemistic term “comfort women” (???, ianfu) refers to the women and girls forced to provide sexual services in “comfort stations” (???, ianjo) across Japanese-occupied territories from the early 1930s until the end of World War II. Although the term was the one used in official Japanese military documents, it obscures the reality of coercion, deception, and violence that characterized the system. There is no definitive estimate of the total number of individuals subjected to military sexual slavery under the Japanese Empire. Historians such as Yoshimi Yoshiaki have suggested that between 50,000 and 200,000 individuals were subjected to military sexual slavery, with “comfort stations” confirmed across East and Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, and other territories under Japanese control (Yoshimi Reference Yoshimi2000: 91–97). However, subsequent scholarship suggests that these figures may significantly underrepresent the scale of the system. In Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves, Peipei Qiu, with Su Zhiliang and Chen Lifei, argues that in northern China alone the number of Chinese sex slaves may have ranged between 100,000 and 200,000 (Qiu, Su, and Chen Reference Qiu, Su and Chen2014: 37–41). While Korean and Chinese women were the most numerous, victims included people of various genders and nationalities, including some who today might identify as queer (Portes Reference Portes2000; Dempster Reference Dempster2006).
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