Il «velo dell’avvenire»: Scipio Sighele e i reati danteschi

The essay further investigates ‒ in a sociological perspective ‒ Scipio Sighele’s conference Dante’s Crimes and Criminals delivered in Rovereto on 4 October 1896. The influence of the social environment, the separation between violent and fraudulent crimes and criminal offences and the mimetic implementation of retaliation are some of the penal tenets that Sighele tracked down in the first cantica of Dante’s poem, where the handing down of sentences has a symbolic and social meaning too. In other words, Dante’s modernity resides in his more serious punishment of fraudulent crimes, as Sighele emphasizes referring to the obsolescence of the Italian prison system and the need to prosecute the new crimes afflicting public institutions with greater severity, offences such as misappropriation, malfeasance and extortion. Of course Sighele did not neglect some specific crimes of high journalistic impact as in the case nowadays of violence on women. Old and new forms of violence and corruption are still in great evidence, and are criticized by Sighele for the purpose of informing a public opinion at that time in shock after the scandal of the “Banca Romana” and the events of the Sicilian “Fasci”. Thus Sighele can investigate the negative effects of the chronicling of judicial cases and the diffusion of new forms of crime, in line with the civil model provided by Dante’s legacy.