La dinamica del capro espiatorio nelle ritualità pubbliche fra Cinque e Settecento

The most celebrated case of scapegoating in Milanese justice from the 16th to the 18th Centuries is the death sentence meted out to alleged plague-spreaders tried and convicted in 1630. Recounted and analysed in the equally celebrated essays of Pietro Verri, the Osservazioni sulla tortura, and of Alessandro Manzoni, the Storia della colonna infame, the tragic affair of health commissioner Guglielmo Piazza and barber Gian Giacomo Mora reveals the sacrificial basis of the rituals of justice. More than that, it illuminates the social and cultural ‘dynamic’ of the scapegoat in a Christian context, with the generative power of ideas, debates, reforms and new political, social and ethical mediations caused, furthered and induced not only by the sacrifice of innocents but also by the spectacle of the public execution of criminals. It was no accident that Milan became a European centre of thought on justice, courtesy of Cesare Beccaria and Alessandro Manzoni. Nor was it that the first ever abolition of the death penalty anywhere in the world took place in Italy. In contrast to the rest of Europe, indeed, and thanks to the confraternities that gave solace to condemned prisoners, a model of capital punishment had taken root in the Italian peninsula that was based not on public vendetta but on reconciliation