In Scicli, a conference on literature and justice honours the 'gentleman judge'

Corrado Monaca was drawn from his home by the sound of the shots. The scene of the massacre lay a few minutes away, and Radio RTM, reporting his account, records that some questions about the ambush were never settled. The attackers' submachine gun fired ninety-three rounds; the bullets struck the four doors of the two cars along their left flank, shattering the window glass and killing the escorts. Had Aldo Moro been sitting on the rear left seat of the Fiat 130, Mr Monaca argued, he would have been cut down with them. The kidnapping, in his reading, happened elsewhere — and a misdirection sent him to the Gemelli hospital, where he learned from Moro's brother that the Christian Democrat leader was not there.

He was speaking decades later in Scicli, at the conference of the Associazione internazionale dei critici letterari, co-organised with the town council as "Letteratura e giustizia. Nel centenario della nascita del giudice Severino Santiapichi". The meeting opened on 2 October 2026 in the council chamber, where the mayor, Mario Marino, delivered a prolusion on the magistrate, born in the town in 1926; greetings came from the council president Desirè Ficili and the culture assessor Giuseppe Mariotta, Novetv reports. Santiapichi had been a lawyer, a pretore, a magistrate and president of the First Assize Court of Rome, procuratore generale in Perugia and procuratore ad honorem of the Court of Cassation; he presided over some of the most complex trials of the republican era, among them the case for the attack on Pope John Paul II and the Moro-bis trial, and was vice-president of the Supreme Court in Somalia. The journalist Salvatore Lordi, who recently published a biography of him, called him a "gentleman judge". After retiring he taught on contract at the Kore University of Enna.

Three sessions over two days moved between the council chamber, Palazzo Spadaro and the Museo d'Arte Contemporanea del Carmine, pairing censorship with justice. The Spaniards Angel Basanta and Fernando Valls spoke on Gonzalo Torrente Ballester under Franco's censorship and on the censorship of yesterday and today; the Romanian Stefan Damian on justice at the chessboard. At Palazzo Spadaro in the afternoon, Pierfranco Bruni took Franz Kafka's The Trial, Anna Santoliquido the memory of Moro in Bari, and Lucia Trombadore the figure of the gentleman judge. The AICL president, Neria De Giovanni, chaired the opening session after attending a conference at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, marking a century since Grazia Deledda's Nobel; she closed the programme with a paper on Deledda's 1899 novel La Giustizia. Novetv reports the proceedings are published by Nemapress Edizioni.

Mr Monaca's talk, billed as "From Via Fani to Scicli" and linking Leonardo Sciascia with Santiapichi, met with what Scicli Video Notizie called an unexpected success. Its centre was the Moro-bis trial Santiapichi presided over as head of the First Assize Court of Rome, which Mr Monaca said consolidated the earlier Moro-uno proceedings with the new Moro-bis strand. It ended in 1983 with 32 life sentences, largely confirmed on appeal and in cassation. He traced the sequence Moro I to Moro Quinquies and said many shadow zones remain in the record; he cited Sciascia's Affaire Moro and the thesis, which he considered still current, of a script written in advance but not by the Red Brigades. Radio RTM records his recollection of the 55 days of the kidnapping, a vast and useless deployment of police through which he crossed Italy several times unchecked, and the closing reflection on the judiciary as a guarantee rather than an alternative power.

He put the killing in periodising terms: the elimination of the president of the Christian Democrats, he said, was a historical caesura that ended the political and social stability of the post-war years and opened the present scenario, "with the hope of finding, as soon as possible, a stability of peace". Saturday morning's final session at the Carmine museum, chaired by the AICL vice-president Angel Basanta, turns to André Gide, Colum McCann, Vicente Aleixandre, Dante, Gramsci and Enzo Tortora, and the medieval Sardinian judge Eleonora d'Arborea. What lingers is the pairing of images: the four car doors pierced along their left flank, and the reserved magistrate whose trial record, as Radio RTM's account of the closing remarks had it, still holds truths not fully clarified — with President Sergio Mattarella's appeal to seek truth as "the primary objective of democracy" invoked in the room.