The crime of plagiarism, foreseen by the Rocco code, and which remained in force until 1981, only once led a man to trial and conviction. It happened in 1968 and went down in history as “the Braibanti case”. A story which, however, has been forgotten despite the great outcry it caused at the time, and which has been rediscovered thanks to the film The lord of the ants by director Gianni Amelio.
Aldo Brabanti was an all-round intellectual, poet, man of letters, playwright, director, ceramist, but he was also a passionate entomologist, particularly studying ants and called himself a myrmecologist. Born in Fiorenzuola d’Arda on 17 September 1922, he showed strong artistic talents already as a child. An excellent student at the Parma classical high school, Braibanti obtained exemption from paying taxes. He joined the partisan resistance first joining the “Justice and Freedom” movement and then the Communist Party He was arrested twice, the first time with the future republican secretary Ugo La Malfa. , then together with a group of partisans which also included Sandro Pertini. After the war he became the head of the Tuscan Communist Youth. In 1947, however, he abandoned politics to dedicate himself to various cultural aspects, primarily the artistic ones. Also in 1947 it begins the community experience of the Farnese tower of Castell’Arquato, an artistic laboratory for six years it became a multipurpose ceramic studio. In 1962 he moved to Rome. In that period he worked in the theater with the young Carmelo Bene. Appreciated by the intellectuals of his time for his unconventional vision, profound culture, avant-garde scenic ideas, he was a homosexual. Even if in post-war Italy sexual orientation in itself was no longer a reason for incarceration or confinement, it was still a condition that was opposed, to be kept hidden, and the object of social disapproval. But the person who brought the charge of plagiarism and therefore the trial was the family of one of the young people who frequented his ateliers and laboratories, Giovanni Sanfratello, aged 23. The family was against the cultural path undertaken by their son, who, in open conflict with his parents, then left home to join Braibanti in Rome. The two were having an affair, and this was the pretext for his father to report him for plagiarism. In November 1964 a group of four men arrived without warning at the guesthouse where the professor and the young man were staying and forcibly took the boy. Giovanni will be transferred first to Modena to a private clinic for nervous diseases, then to the mental hospital in Verona where he will undergo a large number of electroshock treatments and various insulin shocks to correct his homosexual orientation, considered as a mental illness. All this against his will. A trial was immediately brought against Braibanti for plagiarism and it was of no avail that the young man was an adult and continued to have always consented both at the time of his capture, both in the mental hospital and at the trial.
On 14 July 1968 the Court of Assizes of Rome sentenced Aldo Braibanti to nine years in prison for plagiarism. On 27 September 1969 the Court of Assizes of Appeal reduced the sentence to four years (two of which were pardoned as he was a former partisan). The support and stance of illustrious figures such as Marco Pannella, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia, Dacia Maraini and Umberto Eco were of no avail. CThus Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote on the case: “If there is a “mild” man in the purest sense of the term, it is Braibanti: in fact he never relied on anything or anyone; he never asked or demanded anything. So what crime did he commit to be condemned through the pretextual accusation of plagiarism? His crime was his weakness. But he chose and wanted this weakness for himself, rejecting any form of authority: authority, which, as an author, in some way, would have come naturally to him, only if he had accepted even to a minimal extent any common idea of the intellectual: or the communist one or the bourgeois one or the Catholic one, or the simply literary one… Instead he refused to identify himself with any of these – ultimately buffoonish – intellectual figures”. Then, in September 1971, the Court of Cassation declared the sentence final, with which article 603 of the Criminal Code which provides for the charge of plagiarism is applied for the first time in Italy. “Braibanti, an adult, strong-willed, expert, subtle, dialectical, controlled, tenacious, homosexually intellectual man – reads the sentence – has a vice that he must satisfy and which invades his entire psychic Being, which moves and dominates him; he is undoubtedly cultured even if disharmonized and not integrated, but he is also ambitious, proud, immodest; physically disadvantaged, he has by law of compensation exalted – and is led to overestimate – his intellectual gifts. But he’s practically a failure: he writes books that no one reads; almost fifty years old, he still lives a life of poverty, of stuffed sandwiches, of washing his own clothes, of charity from his mother, his brother, his friends. She is prey to a thirst for power, for domination and revenge, she professes monism and anarchism, she fights the family, society and the State; she despises school and morality; he repudiates the conformism of the majority because the majority are physically, mentally and sexually healthy, normal people, that is, they have what was denied to him.”
