Ceretti: 'No elaboration of the years of lead, we risk surprises'

It was the solidity of a 'profoundly Catholic and radically anti-fascist' family - father a jeweller from the Milanese bourgeoisie, mother the pillar of the entire household - that transmitted to him the natural repulsion towards any form of arrogance, in which he could already see the degeneration of certain fringes, which attracted many of his peers. "Then there was the Galli crime (19 March 1980). When you see your professor, Guido Galli, with whom I was preparing my thesis, a magistrate, murdered in front of the university lecture hall there is only aberration'. Not in my name.

The burnt-out youth of those years Ceretti continued to listen to it throughout his life, helping to bring the victims of that violence out of a long condition of marginality and them, the political prisoners, out of the prison of their own labyrinth, the title of a play in 1988: 'it upset me greatly. The invisibles represented themselves on stage: Franco Bonisoli, Lauro Azzolini, Enzo Fontana and other former members of the armed struggle'. As in a maieutic journey, after flashes of memory Ceretti entrusts us with an analysis of current events.

"We do not know what is really boiling in the pot beyond this rampant aggression. Disorganised, primitive passions, linked to the idea that you only exist if you can counteract them, are flowing into social networks. It is the time of the tribes, as Michel Maffesoli put it, the era of the drying up of institutions, of the pulverisation of the social body; the era of ephemeral networks and pulsional discharges. In the 1970s you entered with your body into assemblies and certain thoughts, even unacceptable ones. Today, aggregations take place in places where public opinion has less capacity to grasp what is maturing, we radicalise on the internet. We may therefore be surprised and not see them coming'. Do not underestimate, do not dramatise.

Is everything destined to remain like this, if not to be repeated then? It is never too late, in the opinion of the man accustomed to mending the brokenness of the worst crimes, for 'a path in which the heirs of all those movements rely on a group of third parties, considered by all to be authoritative and impartial, to begin to bring thoughts together around unresolved issues'. In this perspective, the proposal by the mayor of Milan, Beppe Sala, to name a street after all the young people who fell in that era of ideological follies and easy guns could be 'the outcome of a path of recomposition, an important symbolic gesture of arrival, not the opposite'. Like the mass that Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini celebrated for all the victims of the years of lead, without distinction.

The first difficulty 'is to find arbitrators recognised by all as super partes, a condition that sanctioned the success of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa' at the end of the Apartheid. A shining example of restorative justice, a path of 'recognition by the offender of his responsibility,' Ceretti explains, 'with the willingness to make reparation with a symbolic gesture. This brings the victim out of his cemetery paradigm, according to the provocative definition in Daniele Giglioli's essay (Criticism of the Victim. Nottetempo). Out of the isolation of trauma, back into the world. "It is the society's recognition of the difficult other", he concludes, recalling an expression by Claudia Mazzucato, a lecturer at the Università Cattolica, one of the "decisive encounters of my career, together with the whole group from that university; and then the one with Marta Cartabia".

Together with Mazzucato and the Jesuit Guido Bertagna, Ceretti will share the experience of the Group, seven years of rapprochement between "people who had suffered a terrible evil and those who had caused that evil, all united by something as mysterious as it is strong and inescapable: the demand for justice", reads the prologue to the Book of the meeting, the story of the journey of victims and perpetrators of the armed struggle towards "accepted words" and new eyes. Words and eyes of those who listened, like Agnese Moro, daughter of the Christian Democrat statesman killed by the Red Brigades, who also opened the doors of her home to the group.

Compared to the times of that 'uncomfortable and scandalous' experience, restorative justice is now part of our legal system - (even if the last implementation steps are missing) - more and more 'accepted even by criminalists who were initially against it,' Ceretti recalls, 'precisely because of its cross-fertilisation of views. A marriage of visions, as in the discussions that led to our Constitution. Authoritative voices in the public debate go so far as to theorise a future primacy of this 'mild justice' over the criminal trial. "But for me, as Agnese Moro says, first the foul must be whistled and the game interrupted," he articulates. First, that is, there must be the sentences pronounced in the name of the Italian people; then or at the same time, the justice of the encounter can flow. This is what it was like in South America, in the journey begun after the laying down of arms by the Farc; this is what it was like in the single, atrocious stories he was called to deal with: the girl who kills her mother and brother with her boyfriend, without ever being abandoned by her father; the man who, after having blown up his house, causing the death of his wife and a couple of neighbours, finds his daughter, burnt in the explosion. It is that need to rebuild 'a level of familiarity that only indirectly relates to any penal norm: it helps victims to move on and perpetrators to be welcomed back into the community'. A word, community, which is central to the paths of reparation, because the crime radiates its destructive effects on the entire context. "A word that we managed to get included in the law," smiles Ceretti, who coordinated the working group on restorative justice set up by the then Guardasigilli Marta Cartabia.

But how did a child of the 1970s come to this approach, which was unknown until recently? 'A gap began to open up in the 1980s: as an expert member of the Milan Surveillance Court, I found myself listening in court to the letter sent by a former member of the Gap, Partisan Action Groups, in his application for conditional release, to the widow of the policeman killed at a roadblock. There, at that moment it was as if the face of that woman, completely marginalised by legislation, appeared before my eyes; I felt I had to look for something more and different from criminal law. That letter was the trigger for a series of disorientations and research on how to build a bridge to this invisible subject, the victim'.

The words flow slowly over several time lines and several times Adolfo Ceretti's gaze rests on a grey, wide-brimmed hat: 'inherited from the grandfather whose name I bear. A liberal monarchist, he was one of the seven lawyers who did not join the fascist party and suffered a regime trial. The family's house was confiscated and he found the squadrists under the house: they didn't beat him, but they made him drop this hat. He had to bend down to pick it up, gestures that I call small excommunications from the world'. A reminder of the disasters that any form of abuse can generate, in relations between people and between states. The opposite of the search for encounters, on which justice rests, capable sometimes more than condemnations of repairing the lacerations of evil.