«La cognizione del dolore» e il dolore nella cognizione

“Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana" (“That Awful Mess on Via Merulana") and “La cognizione del dolore” (" The knowledge of pain”) are two fundamental works for any criminal lawyer who wants to reflect on the nature of crime. What matters of such works is not that they are both "detective novels". It is the observation of human reality and of the “Baroque” world, an apparent irrationality that must be investigated and understood, that suggest the choice of “crime novels” to Carlo Emilio Gadda. Even the crime of matricide is not the result of a single cause, but of a number of causes. This idea leads the criminologist to the theory of circular causality as a precondition for the etiology of crime. But human reason seems to get lost in the " gnommero" (ball of thread), of causes . The inability to fully explain the crime however helps the jurist to escape some positivistic tendencies, which lead to think that every human phenomenon is perfectly ascrivable to strict categories, thus allowing a deeper sight and closer approach to the truth of each human action.