(Hi)stories of Roman Law. Cesare Maccari’s frescoes in the Aula Massima of the Italian Supreme Court

“We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians” says a famous motto commonly attributed to Massimo d’Azeglio, one of the protagonists of the Italian “Risorgimento”. In 1861, in fact, when the Kingdom of Italy was unified from a legal point of view, it was still extremely fragmented from a cultural point of view. The aim of this article is to analyze how historical paintings (and in particular those representing Roman law-related themes) have been used in the Aula Massima of the Palace of Justice in Rome to fill the gap between the “legal country" and "real country", in the period between the late 19th and early 20th century. The undisputed director of this operation was Giuseppe Zanardelli, several times Minister of Justice, who personally chose "the stories of Roman law" to be reproduced, using art and narrative as helpful tools to handle the crisis of a Kingdom still looking for an identity .