He had chosen to retire to his Tarquinia, he was born there and it had always been his good resting place. And in Tarquinia we will celebrate the final farewell to Marcello Melandri, a great lawyer but above all a witty and ironic man, who died on tiptoe in the evening between Sunday and Monday. A smile is his trademark. However, Melandri’s clever jokes and ironic glances always refer to his knowledge of facts and people and the intelligence that emerges even when he is joking. Criminal lawyer in Rome, deep knowledge of the Courts and historical figure of the judicial fortress, 82-year-old Marcello Melandri has also written a history of the capital’s courthouse. He left behind a void that can only be created by those who have had a full life and are able to make it better for those around them.
A passionate and enthusiastic man, he cherished his great love for Harley-Davidson throughout his life, right up to the end, when he had to leave it behind several years ago. When he realized that meeting and adventuring, despite the rain and wind, getting to France, with friends who had the same interests, had become a gamble. But until then, Marcello Melandri, when he took off his toga, traveled on a motorbike like a boy.
Career
He entered the legal profession at a very young age and his first extraordinary experiences and important trials were studied with Giuseppe De Luca, about whom he signed a moving memoir more than a year ago. In rooms on the Via della Conciliazione, he had prepared the defense of a defendant in the Lockheed scandal. That was the beginning. 70s. But there will be other successes. Much of his career is associated with the so-called Roman tangentopoli. The “Palazzi doro” trials and then the Craxi and De Michelis trials. And again, later, the defense of former Juventus general director Luciano Moggi in the Gea trial, the defense of former Rai Fiction director Agostino Saccà in the Neapolitan investigation of Silvio Berlusconi. Then the scandal of major events and investigations into the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy. And again the difficult speech of Francesco De Vito Piscicelli, the businessman who laughed on the night of the earthquake in L’Aquila, foreshadowing the subsequent contract, and the trial at the Great Risk commission, where he defended Enzo Boschi, president of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology for twelve years, accused of having convinced the people of L’Aquila before the earthquake. The list is still long and certainly not complete.
Memory
And yesterday at the Court, the news made everyone disbelieving and sad. The condolences and pain of the Crime Chamber are echoed by the voices of those who have traveled the long journey with Melandri: «Marcello had a unique characteristic: a way of acting that made you feel, in front of everyone, like his best friend», recalled his colleague Michele Gentiloni Silverij. «He was a man of rare sympathy and grace, lawyers who belong in the history of the Roman legal profession and I would also say in our personal history», commented Francesco Caroleo Grimaldi. Cataldo Intrieri, on the Facebook page “Lab of legal politics” dedicated a long memory to him: «He was a lawyer who gave you the impression that he was always in court and you would always find him there. When he wasn’t in the courtroom filling the classrooms with his presence and his jokes as a caustic, witty Roman, you would find him perched on the wall in the little square watching the people come and go and you knew that if you passed him you would be struck by his irreverent enthusiasm. But there was no malice, just the irreverence of a long-standing taunt. And this also happened in his career as an excellent and eminent lawyer in the most important trials.” Then an unpublished anecdote: «One of his clients, who wrote his prison memoirs in the time of Mani Pulite, still remembers with amazement when during an interrogation in which the then prosecutor Davigo suppressed him by banging on the table with his hand, Melandri interrupted him by slamming a code in front of him to remind him of the rules, without much frills and with his classic immediacy». His very Roman manner, taste for telling jokes, visible disappointment was simply a screen of rare sensitivity: «Despite his character he had a strong sense of profession and affection – wrote Intrieri – I remember him in his toga in church greeting Titta Madia on the day of her farewell and it is difficult not to be moved by the attitude that contrasted with his disappointed character He did not like rhetoric and turns of phrase, but he would forgive us if today we who knew him abandoned ourselves to invincible sadness. Following his profession were his two sons, Michelangelo and Matteo, who inherited the interest and learned the “trade” from their father.
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
