A Philosopher above the Lawmakers: Filangieri in the Italian Senate, from the Kingdom to the Republic
by Mario Riberi*
Look up in the chamber of Palazzo Madama, the seat of the Italian Senate in Rome, and you will find Gaetano Filangieri. When the Senate of the Kingdom of Italy settled permanently in the capital and renovated its hall, the painted velarium above the senators was given four medallions, and four jurists: Papinian for Roman law, Irnerius for the medieval revival of legal learning, Machiavelli for the political side of the legal order, and Filangieri for the idea that legislation could be a science. Before anyone quoted him in a debate, the Neapolitan philosopher had been painted into the ceiling of the state.
That image is the starting point of my research on the afterlife of the Science of Legislation in the Italian Senate, a sequel to the survey of Filangieri in the Chamber of Deputies that I published in the volume Cittadino di tutti i luoghi, contemporaneo di tutte le età (2024). The Senate offers a more fragmentary record than the Chamber, but one that unfolds on three planes: the symbolic, the rhetorical and the textual, from the painted ceiling to verbatim quotations in the stenographic reports of the present legislature.
In the liberal era, Filangieri’s name appears rarely in the Senate records; what circulates is his phrase. On December 12, 1910, during the budget debate of the Ministry of Justice, the civil law scholar Vittorio Polacco denounced the fragmentation of Italian norms and the distrust it bred, warning that citizens had come to believe “that a true science of legislation, a single principle of justice, does not exist, but that the caprice of whoever commands reigns supreme, varying from place to place, from time to time.”
I read Polacco’s lament as the historical fulfilment of a diagnosis Filangieri had made a century and a half earlier. In the Political Reflections of 1774, written in defense of a Neapolitan reform that obliged judges to state the legal grounds of their sentences and forbade them to rest on the opinions of scholars, the young Filangieri had equated judicial interpretation, equity and arbitrariness, and had assigned authentic interpretation to the legislator alone. The law, for him, was a barrier “against the torrent of arbitrariness,” and civil liberty depended on its certainty. When the legal order fragments into contradictory statutes, interpretation ceases to guarantee justice and becomes a source of uncertainty: the “legislative chaos” decried in the Senate of the Kingdom was the institutional projection of the problem Filangieri had placed at the heart of his work.
The most revealing episode is the Senate debate of 1875 on capital punishment, where Filangieri was claimed by everyone. Senator Musio invoked a “Macedonian phalanx” of the greatest jurists “faithful to the banner of Filangieri, Romagnosi and Rossi” and borrowed from the Science the argument that society, standing toward criminals “in a state of permanent aggression,” inherits the victim’s right of self-defense: hence the death penalty as collective legitimate defense.
The abolitionists could not ignore him, so they turned him against himself. The lawyer Luigi Chiesi conceded that “Filangieri admits the legitimacy of the death penalty for the gravest crimes,” but set that concession against Filangieri’s own principles: if “a tyrannical law cannot be maintained in a free people” and “a ferocious law must be erased from the Code of a civilized and humane people,” what law is more tyrannical than one that kills? Others quoted his page on the executioner, whose children “would always bear on their foreheads the mark of infamy.” The Keeper of the Seals, Pasquale Stanislao Mancini, placed him beside Beccaria as proof that all the great Italian criminalists had subordinated punishment to its social usefulness. Filangieri, in short, functioned as the necessary dialectical hub through which the Senate thought about punishment at all.
After 1948, the reference went underground for a time, then resurfaced where one might least expect it: in the Senate’s technical output on the quality of legislation. A dossier of the seventeenth legislature on better regulation opens programmatically with Filangieri’s complaint about “so many laws of exception for a single law of principle, so many interpretive laws for a single fundamental law.” The eighteenth-century critic of legislative hypertrophy is enlisted as the remote ancestor of simplification policy.
Then the quotations return to the floor. On September 22, 2021, debating the reform of criminal procedure, Senator Pietro Grasso, a former anti-mafia prosecutor, cited the Science of Legislation on the task of criminal procedure: “to remove as much as possible from the innocent every terror, from the offender every hope, and from the judges every arbitrariness.” And on May 7, 2025, opening the debate on a regulatory simplification bill, Senator Mariastella Gelmini began with Filangieri inveighing “against the chaos of legislation,” a keen reader of Montesquieu’s warning that useless laws weaken necessary ones: a noble genealogy for a reform presented as protecting “ordinary people” from contradictory norms.
Lined up, these fragments describe a shift. The Senate of the Kingdom canonized Filangieri as a symbol and borrowed his formula to denounce the absence of a coherent legal system; the Senate of the Republic reactivates him as the author of usable criteria for criminal justice and for the architecture of legislation itself. Along the way, the Science of Legislation migrates from public happiness and the design of a political order to the more technical ground of legislative quality and fair procedure. If the Chamber of Deputies was the door through which Filangieri entered the Italian constitutional and codification debate, the Senate has preserved the meta-legislative core of his lesson: that a law, to be just, must be rational, clear and coherent, and that a trial must protect citizens from fear and arbitrariness before it protects them through severity.
Much remains to be done: a systematic census of “science of legislation” and “Filangieri” across the records of both Senates, with manual checking of the nineteenth-century volumes; a study of senators’ libraries and committee papers; an iconographic history of the four jurists on the ceiling. But one conclusion already seems safe. The Italian Parliament has never applied Filangieri’s program to the letter. It has done something more durable: it has kept using his language to measure its own shortcomings. The philosopher on the ceiling is still watching the legislators below.
* Associate Professor of History of Law, University of Turin
Image: The painted velario above the Senate chamber at Palazzo Madama, Rome. Its decorative program includes portraits of Gaetano Filangieri, Niccolò Machiavelli, Irnerius, and Emilio Papinian. Screenshot from the Senate of the Republic’s virtual tour.
