WALTER VELTRONI, THE SENTENCE (Rizzoli; pp 224; 18.50 euros)
The anger of the people and summary justice.
Moreover.
The madness of the furious and blind crowd and the unreasonable torture of a human being, victim not so much of history but of chance, of superficiality, of the narrow-minded hunger for oppression, of summary, unreasonable revenge.
And above all "antidemocratic".
Because "democracy never lynches anyone. Nor can it invoke justifications for tolerating the lynching of a human being."
Walter Veltroni returns to the history and news of those convulsive days of a Rome recently liberated from the Nazi-fascist occupation: it is September 1944 when the people's anger turns into summary justice against Donato Carretta, director of Regina Coeli, lynched and massacred by an angry mob.
That morning the trial was supposed to open against Pietro Caruso, former police commissioner of the capital, accused, among other things, of having compiled the list of people destined for the Fosse Ardeatine.
A crowd pressed outside the courtroom, broke through the cordons to enter shouting "death to Caruso", but the former police commissioner was not there.
Carretta was there.
He was in the courtroom to testify against Caruso, but was pointed out by a woman as responsible for the deaths of people detained in Regina Coeli.
And for this reason he was lynched by the crowd, dissatisfied and hungry for revenge, thrown into the Tiber, beaten with an oar and then hung from the bars of a prison window.
It is the story of the "fragile emotional stability" of a blind mass in search of a scapegoat and of the dismay of a man who accidentally finds himself on the wrong side of the bend in history.
"It gave me a lot of pain to write about this man who wakes up one morning to go and testify against a fascist, about a man who had made Pertini and Saragat escape: and instead ends up walking upwards, the victim of a frightening and violent lynching ".
But The Condemnation also tells of a past that is still current, in which it is possible to read the present in which we live.
The violence of social media comes to mind but, Veltroni's invitation, it is not just that, there is not only virtual violence: "We live in a moment in which language has lost the boundaries of democracy" which can be expressed in many ways but "never with incitement to violence".
Like the one pronounced instead by Trump which evokes the "bloodbath" in the event of his failure to be re-elected.
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