“Rome was not the world of religion, of abstract sciences, of literature, of fine arts, because in all those fields other people could defeat it; Rome was the world of law. For law, Romans had a historical vocation, deriving from their intellectual genius, from their moral virtue, from their character, from the force and the persistency of will”. These words, pronounced by the Italian Minister of Justice Giuseppe Zanardelli during the foundation stone-laying ceremony of the Palace of Justice (now seat of the Supreme Court of Cassation) in 1889, summarize his ideological program: to make the law one of the cornerstones of unified Italy (1861) with Rome, and especially its glorious and lay legal tradition, as its geographical as well as ideological center. During his long service as Minister of Justice, Zanardelli demonstrated his faith in law as a tool for unifying territories and people, realizing two great works: the first Italian Criminal Code and the Palace of Justice. This chapter aims to describe the events that led to the definition of the very peculiar iconographical plan of the Italian Supreme Court building, meaningfully known to the people of Rome as er Palazzaccio: “the bad palace”.
Gialdroni, S. (2018). Justice Petrified: The Seat of the Italian Supreme Court between Law, Architecture and Iconography. In A.C. Stefan Huygebaert (a cura di), Sensing the Nation's Law. Historical Inquiries into the Aesthetics of Democratic Legitimacy (pp. 117-152). Springer International Publishing [10.1007/978-3-319-75497-0_5].
Justice Petrified: The Seat of the Italian Supreme Court between Law, Architecture and Iconography
Gialdroni Stefania
2018-01-01
Abstract
“Rome was not the world of religion, of abstract sciences, of literature, of fine arts, because in all those fields other people could defeat it; Rome was the world of law. For law, Romans had a historical vocation, deriving from their intellectual genius, from their moral virtue, from their character, from the force and the persistency of will”. These words, pronounced by the Italian Minister of Justice Giuseppe Zanardelli during the foundation stone-laying ceremony of the Palace of Justice (now seat of the Supreme Court of Cassation) in 1889, summarize his ideological program: to make the law one of the cornerstones of unified Italy (1861) with Rome, and especially its glorious and lay legal tradition, as its geographical as well as ideological center. During his long service as Minister of Justice, Zanardelli demonstrated his faith in law as a tool for unifying territories and people, realizing two great works: the first Italian Criminal Code and the Palace of Justice. This chapter aims to describe the events that led to the definition of the very peculiar iconographical plan of the Italian Supreme Court building, meaningfully known to the people of Rome as er Palazzaccio: “the bad palace”.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
