Manzoni e la “furia” del giudizio penale

The kind of “law &literaryre” method that has characterized for thirteen years the so-called meetings and works of Justice and Literature at the Catholic University of Milan, can still be said to be inspired by the question well expressed by the philosopher Roberto Esposito, in the review of the first of the nine volumes that collected the results of this experience: «What can ever connect law to literature? A deep furrow seems to separate the boundless fluidity of literary writing and the rigidity of a juridical order aimed at discriminating between licit and illicit conduct». A method that provokes the fluvial course of narratives by opposing the arrest of judgment - often perceived by the literary worlds in that reductive and constrictive form of thatis the administration of justice of which Leonardo Sciascia felt and branded the terribility - and by observing the whirlwinds and floods that that (unnatural?) interposition generates. It is by moving from such a dialectical view between the two areas that one can grasp at least a sense of the joint (and not simply consecutive) reading of the Promessi sposi and of the Stroia della Colonna infame by Alessandro Manzoni now unavoidable after the relatively recent discovery by the critics of the close relationship between the two works. And the «key to everything», for such a reading, according to Manzoni's own words, lies in the fateful «they feared they wouldn't find him guilty» which the author takes from Verri: a formidable obstruction to the fluidity of that «common sense» which « there was; but he hid for fear of common sense and that, if he prevailed, the matter would have been clearer.