This article is published in number 41 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until 12 October 2021
“Even today Italy is experiencing one of these periods of transition in which the function of the judges, better than that of defending a decrepit legality, is to gradually create the new legality promised by the Constitution … I would like, Gentlemen, Judges that you felt with what anxiety thousands of people throughout Italy are waiting for you to decide with justice, which also means with independence and courage… And that yours is a sentence that opens the heart of hope, not a sentence that reaffirms despair ».
Roberto Saviano did not say these phrases about Mimmo Lucano, the former mayor of Riace indicated ten years ago by the City Mayors Foundation as one of the three best mayors in the world for his social experiment of welcome and solidarity, now sentenced to thirteen years and two months in prison. Piero Calamandrei wrote to her in 1956, in his famous speech in defense of the poet Danilo Dolci, called the Italian Gandhi for hunger strikes and non-violent protests against the mafia, unemployment, illiteracy. When Danilo Dolci was arrested for inciting disobedience and invasion of (uncultivated) land, the great jurist Piero Calamandrei, who had helped write the Constitution, wanted to defend him personally: “The laws are alive because within these formulas it is necessary to circulate the thought of our time, to let the air we breathe enter, put us within our intentions, our hopes, our blood, our tears. Otherwise, the laws are nothing but empty formulas… ». Eventually Danilo Dolci was sentenced to 50 days in prison. Ten years later, the Accademia dei Lincei awarded him the gold medal for his work of spreading humanitarian and cultural values ​​and twenty years later he received the Gandhi International Prize in India for the deepening of non-violent revolutionary values.
We do not know what will become of Mimmo Lucano, but the Locri sentence sends a disturbing message.
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