I was born and raised in a Swedish town called Landskrona. What's remakable about this town, situated in the very south and close to Denmark, is that two blonde girls left for Italy in the late 1960s and became movie stars: Ewa Aulin, who's career was rather short, and Janet Aring;gren (who had to change the spelling of her last name to Agren), who made loads of movies, among them several cult and horror classics.
    The italian mini-series L'AMARO CASO DELLA BARONESSA DI CARINI from 1975 aired on Swedish TV in the summer of 1977. I remember that when the first episode started, my mom said "That girl there is from Landskrona!".
    I had almost forgotten about this series, but I remembered its suggestive opening titles; I remembered there was an Italian TV series when I was a kid, that opened with what I then thought were scary slow-motion images of a woman being stabbed to death and leaving a bloody hand print on a white wall. I had forgotten the title of the series and what it was about.
    A couple of decades later, I was having coffee with Janet Ågren (resulting in an article published in the British magazine The DarkSide in early 2000, I think), and she suddenly mentioned this old TV series - and I almost got goose bumps. Holy crap, it's her! Okay, she didn't play the baroness and left the bloody hand print, but still. Janet said I could borrow the series from her, but that never happened.
    A couple of years ago, I managed to get hold of the complete series from a guy in Italy - but I gave up watching it rather soon. Watching a movie in Italian without subtitles maybe works if it's a crazy splatter movie - not when you watch a talky drama taking place in the 16:th century.
    The TV-series is based on what's supposed to be a true story, but it may be a legend. In a castle in Carini, Sicily, a baronessa was murdered by her father for taking a lover.
    There's also a new TV version of the story, made in 2007.
    Horror fans fondly remember Janet Ågren from CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD (aka GATES OF HELL) by Lucio Fulci, EATEN ALIVE by Umberto Lenzi, and actioners HANDS OF STEEL by Sergio Martino and RED SONJA, against Arnold Schwarzenegger - Janet played Brigitte Nielsen's sister.

The opening titles of THE BARONESSA OF CARINI are HERE, and a clip from the series is HERE.

Janet Ågren back in the 1960s. Photo copyright © Anders Hilding