jurists-from-italy

"(Regarding the secret dossier on Ilaria Alpi) I have absolutely no recollection of having given that document to the then-Chief of Police, and I certainly did not grant any investigative authority to Gianni De Gennaro."

"There are many things I did during that period that I would never do again. I have no qualms about saying that I went through a moral crisis, which culminated when I saw how the Cavaliere's inner circle was taking shape."

"(About the deaths of Ilaria Alpi and Miran Hrovatin) They were on vacation in Somalia; they were not conducting any investigation: the Commission has established this (January 2004)."

"[About the Telekom Serbia case] I confess: I am the puppet master behind this whole affair. I am turning myself in for complicity in slander with Paoletti, Marini, and Pintus. [I] have created difficulties for Forza Italia and Berlusconi. [It is therefore right] that I withdraw from political life. I have made a grave mistake, and this is an open confession; it is right that I make a public apology; I acknowledge that Repubblica is staffed by first-rate journalists. I am making a serious announcement: I will resign as a member of parliament in the coming days. Through the various schemes outlined by Repubblica and my ties to figures such as D’Andria, Fracassi, Di Bari, and even Francesco Pazienza—all linked in the public imagination to rogue intelligence agencies and international fraud and money laundering—I succeeded in making the Telekom Serbia Commission the target of a poisoned chalice. I take full responsibility for the individuals who, by implicating Prodi, Dini, and Fassino, have seriously slandered them; and I accuse myself of complicity in slander, though I hope Repubblica does the same, because while I accuse myself, I would like to know from D’Avanzo and Bonini who their puppet masters were at the time and whom they now serve. Repubblica is right, I cannot sue!"

"(About the case of Eluana Englaro) A genuine murder has taken place. [Even] Parliament itself has been taken for a ride. My complaint would have been for attempted murder; now it will be different—namely, premeditated murder. And it will be filed against the girl’s father Beppino Englaro, against the doctors who treated her, and also against the Public Prosecutor of Udine for abuse of office or for whatever crimes may be identified. As for the prosecutor in Udine, who has been completely inactive, I will request the intervention of the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Milan, which has jurisdiction over crimes committed by the judges in Udine. This barbaric murder, this attack on life, must be punished and brought to justice."

"I worked for years for Berlusconi; I know his strategies. When I was his legal advisor and he asked me to draft laws that would protect him from the magistrates, he certainly made no secret of their ad personam purpose. And I drafted them even better than Ghedini and Pecorella do now. The one on legitimate suspicion—I think it was 2002—he needed to move his trials from Milan to Rome. He asked us for it openly, and we, faithful executors of the prince’s will, set about writing it. And we did a pretty good job, I must say: everything seemed in order. Then one evening in late October, around 11 p.m., a call came from Ciampi. I told Berlusconi that with that amendment, it wouldn’t serve any purpose anymore. He thought about it for a moment and then replied: “Let’s do it this way for now, and we’ll see.” I was right: in fact, the law passed with those amendments and was of no use to him."

"You have given me back the smile of creation, Giulia! (p. 21)"

"The grace of the Lord, now returned to me after so much horrendous scepticism, through your gentle intercession, O Giulia, and your love, brings fresh and pure sap back to the old and sturdy centuries-old trunk. With you, it is a cluster of white roses that surrounds the old black oak tree for centuries."

"Every day must pass in such a way that in the evening we can say, “Today we loved more than yesterday”. Only in this way can we live, Giulia, only in this way can we think, only in this way can we grow. (p. 28)"

"Your strong and loving spirit has drawn its light and its flames from Him. Therefore, I am truly, greatly, incredibly fortunate: because in order to love you and think of you, I must love the Truth and think of the Truth. (p. 4)"

"Every time we look into each other's eyes and intertwine our hands, we must feel respectful and confident in the presence of Infinite Love. (p. 3)"

"Giulia, let me see in your eyes the sweetness of the first stars. (p. 64)"

"The world often calls a man fortunate who has many fortunes. As always, the world is mistaken. Fortunate is the man who can find his own being reflected in the being of another spirit, for he truly lives his life to the full. (p. 4)"

"Umberto Cerroni, Il pensiero politico del Novecento, Il sapere, Tascabili Economici Newton, Roma, 1995. ISBN 88-7983-971-3."

"[...] Machiavelli is the first great Italian political thinker completely and definitively freed from any cultural dependence on theology and Catholic culture: he is also the first entirely secular European political thinker, who no longer refers to the sacred scriptures, to which Hobbes and Locke will still refer. (chap. 4, p. 35)"

"The idea of national unification matured in Italian political thought at the end of the 18th century and in the early decades of the 19th century under the weight of new foreign invasions and the failure of new political experiments such as the Neapolitan Republic and the Napoleonic Republic. These new disappointments eroded the remnants of the rhetorical tradition and put political speculation and reflection on the customs and public spirit of Italians to the test of realism. (chap. 6, p. 60)"

"Umberto Cerroni, Il pensiero politico italiano, Il sapere, Tascabili Economici Newton, Roma, 1995. ISBN 88-8183-265-8."

"Poised between a last, desperate attempt to outline a strategy for the construction of a unified state and the dramatic awareness of the political impotence to which the Italians are reduced, Machiavelli is a great, solitary witness to the political decline of a highly intellectual civilisation. He has something of Dante in him, a passionate politician and disdainful exile, and of Luther. He is the last great voice of our realistic tradition and the first modern reformer of Italian consciousness. (chap. 4, p. 36)"

"Italian politics left the European stage, becoming vulgarised in partisan competitions, and culture was saved only by distancing itself from politics and living in a national political vacuum."

"A notable cultural impulse to Catholic political and social thought came from the Modernist movement (Adolf Harnack, Alfred Loisy, Ernesto Buonaiuti), which proposed a profound renewal of religious traditions in the face of new trends in science, liberalism and socialism. (chap. 3, p. 45)"

"Controversial with populist traditionalism, Lenin argued that new social forces had to take the lead in the modernisation process by fighting for representative democracy and political freedoms. This analysis prompted the economist Lenin to devote himself to political action. And it was certainly this analysis that led to the development of his theory of socialist leadership of the democratic movement in a peasant country. (chap. 1, p. 13)"

"The Truth is what you seek when you do not yet know what it is, but you know it exists."

"Fascism in Italy brought together disparate social forces from a wide range of political backgrounds (socialists, anarchists, revolutionary syndicalists, clerical Catholics, nationalists, atheist republicans, former monarchist officers), united by their discontent with the agitation of workers and peasants and the peace treaty. There was also a lack of serious programmatic elaboration because fascism originated as a street movement organised by squadrist actions and “punitive expeditions” carried out in retaliation against leagues, chambers of labour, socialist sections and newspapers. (chap. 3, p. 36)"

"Overall, the three great figures of Bruno, Campanella and Sarpi attest that in Italy the distinction between civis and fidelis, opposed by the Church, had established itself in the highest consciences, laying the foundations for the sovereignty of modern states and also for freedom of conscience and religion. (chap. 5, p. 47)"

"Resistance to political unification was not Italy's only problem. This was certainly the primary problem, but it was also the result of a profound process of disintegration following centuries of fragmentation. Literary culture had long been sterile and remained so at least until Parini; philosophical and scientific culture was more a constellation of individual personalities, sometimes brilliant but almost always isolated and persecuted. In many respects, the condition of culture was the same as that of the Italian language: refined, but little connected to the everyday communication of Italians. (chap. 6, p. 62)"

"The Cold War created serious ideological divisions, and the growing intrusiveness of political parties, encouraged by the proportional electoral system and the lack of alternative governments, led to clientelism, corruption and inefficiency. Land parcelling, hidden financing and parliamentary consociationalism led to a regression of the parties, prompting the intervention of the judiciary. Almost all parties, subjected to serious ideological erosion, had to change their names, symbols and leadership as a difficult transition to a new majority political system began. (chap. 7, pp. 83-84)"

"The role played by the Catholic Church in Italian history and culture has generally been assessed from a highly ideological perspective. The main emphasis has been on the spiritual role played by the Church in inspiring Italian culture and art. Less attention has been paid to analysing the political and institutional role played by the Church. In particular, the role played by the “'Papal States”', the only case of temporal power in the West, has been completely overlooked. Instead, emphasis is placed on the balancing function that it is said to have played in Italy, which was in fact inspired by the Church's desire to protect itself from any attempt to unify the Italian peninsula. (chap. 1, p. 11)"

"Based on the observation that the economic conditions of the proletariat had improved, thanks in part to political struggles, Eduard Bernstein set out to “revise” the entire Marxist tradition. He rejected the “theory of collapse” of capitalist society due to the impossibility of overcoming crises of underconsumption. From there, Bernstein went on to deny the need for a revolutionary transition to socialism and argued for the possibility of social transformation through reforms. Reformism and the introduction of universal suffrage would deliver power to the workers. (chap. 1, pp. 10-11)"

"For Vyšinskij, the state remained a mere instrument of the party's political will, and the law could be nothing more than an expression of that will. Strongly opposing his theoretical adversaries, Vyšinskij did not fail to assert the argument of force as Attorney General in Stalin's trials. (chap. 4, p. 54)"

"Frederick II's attempt was part of the European process of forming the first modern states, which culminated first in the Battle of Bouvines (1214) and then in the bitter clash between secular powers and the Church. In this conflict, which led to the conquest of full secular sovereignty by France and England, Frederick failed. He failed as emperor but also as unifier of Italy. He was, after all, Italian, the son of a Sicilian mother, heir to the Norman kingdom of the South, educated in the nascent Italian culture of which he was a promoter and also a protagonist."

"Le Iene [TV program] are a bit of a cheat, but if my colleagues didn't use drugs, it wouldn't show."

"It is better for a child to stay in Africa than to be adopted by same-sex couples."

"(Responding to Silvio Berlusconi's provocation: ‘She is more beautiful than intelligent’) Evidently I am a woman who is not at his disposal."

"Berlusconi has changed Italy a lot, but as far as I am concerned he has not changed it for the better, mainly because he has cleared certain attitudes towards women, money, and the sense of institutions. Berlusconi had a patronising attitude with all things in the world, such as women, politics, power, the relationship between public and private. He had a patrimonial relationship with all things and with all people around him. And that was unacceptable to me."

"But why does the Pd leave peace, work, the fight against poverty to others?"

"Malta has long been under observation because it has become a place where the Italian mafia operates in drug trafficking, gambling, immigration and oil trafficking: all businesses involving Italian citizens"

"The first results of our work show that among the names of the members of the Masonic Lodges of Calabria and Sicily, there are some who have been sentenced for 416 bis, i.e. for mafia association, and a considerable number of judicial situations in progress, defendants, remanded for trial, both of mafia crimes and of what we commonly call the spy crimes of mafia behaviour or in any case of collusion with the mafia. [...] For us, this investigation is very important, especially because we are talking about a sort of new mafia organisation that brings together pieces of the mafia, pieces of Freemasonry, the State, and the ruling classes of our country."

"To the Pd, however, I reproach it for being too flat on supporting the Draghi government. It was right to support him, but it was necessary to be able to make it understood that the project of the left that was running to govern the country had another vision."

"Cosa nostra of Sicily and the 'ndrangheta of Calabria have from time immemorial and consistently to this day nurtured and cultivated a heightened interest in Freemasonry. [...] On the part of the Masonic associations, there has been a sort of surrender to the mafia. It is the cases, certainly the most recurrent, in which a form of mere tolerance is found that prove to be the most worrying."

"Of course, if Rosy Bindi took the time this summer to reread the PD statute, she could not have failed to see that there is a rule preventing her from running for more than three terms. She is on her sixth."

"(On Walter Veltroni's candidacy in the Democratic Party primaries) And he would run in the name of what? Of a line with which we have already lost, in one fell swoop, government, alliances and elections?"

"(On the PD premier candidate's primaries) If Renzi wants to run for the primaries, he should resign from the PD, because the candidate is the PD secretary by statute. And if he is changed, then let him know that he will not be alone."

"I have nothing personal against D'Alema, Bindi, Veltroni and the others: but they didn't make it. And so I say it, with the utmost respect and humility, but I say it: that's enough now, it's the turn of others. Their time is really over."

"(About the supply of weapons to Ukraine following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022) If I had been in parliament, I would have voted to send weapons, at least at the beginning, because an attacked country must be helped to defend itself."

"Clearly, Berlusconi can no longer hold his majority together. It is a whole political phase that is coming to an end, for better or for worse. You see, Berlusconism has always been founded on ‘I am in charge here’. Now, given that the break with Fini is serious and that in the relationship with the Lega it is no longer the Cavaliere who has the ball in his hand, that method no longer works."

"The National Mourning for Berlusconi is inappropriate and misplaced. [...] I think that national mourning should be reserved for personalities who have united the country and not for those who have divided it, for people who have distinguished themselves for particular achievements, for personalities of art and culture, for those who have sacrificed their lives for the country. But I find national mourning inappropriate for a Prime Minister who was much loved but who was also capable of not being loved by others. And who was divisive on fundamental issues, such as the sense of institutions, respect for the Constitution, respect for women, the country's image around the world. Why the national mourning? Why should all the country's institutions have a flag at half-mast and Parliament be stopped? [...] We are in a phase of sanctification, carried out by its TV stations but also by RAI, which is not good for the country and does not correspond to the truth."

"(On the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022) [...] these seven months of war tell us that the longer it goes on, the more complicated the road to a ceasefire and a possible understanding becomes. [...] I know that sitting at the table with the aggressor is repugnant, but compromise is also sought with the aggressor."

"I do not accept lessons in political ethics from Bindi: she is ugly, mean and a cretin."

"[...] I would like us to overcome the two specular vices of the Italian Left: that of division and the minority and group tendency, and that of subalternity to the dominant liberalism thought imbued with manias of governmentalism."

"I have a busy agenda since 2018, I am not a member of the P also because the PD has never shown that it needs me."