On July 4 there was the first degree sentence of the trial for the murder of Willy Monteiro Duarte, the boy beaten to death in Colleferro on the night between 5 and 6 September 2020. The sentences imposed on the four defendants had been widely provided for throughout the trial: life imprisonment for the brothers Marco and Gabriele Bianchi, more than twenty years (respectively 21 and 23) to Mario Pincarelli and Francesco Belleggia.
The reactions to the reading of the sentence were also predictable: relief from Duarte’s family and friends; disappointment and anger of the condemned, who in recent days have tried to exonerate themselves by accusing each other and portraying themselves as victims of a media trial; and outside, a fairly unanimous chorus that applauded the life sentences and sentences of more than twenty years with the usual “throw the key”.
After all, the case of Willy Duarte’s death has never been a mystery. The beating took place in less than a minute, and the carabinieri arrived to pick up the culprits after less than half an hour. The trial only confirmed what was evident and scary that Saturday night in 2020: a boy beaten into a heartbreak by some guys who didn’t know him.
The witnesses were many, ready for a lynching of the guilty. When the Bianchi brothers were taken to the police station, a crowd gathered outside, and there was a real risk, as on Sunday there was no judge to validate the arrest, that they were released and ended up being attacked. .
After two years, common sense regarding this story hasn’t changed much. And the process leaves two questions unanswered. The first concerns the reasons why Duarte’s murder took place: why did the Bianchi brothers use “disproportionate violence” (as the sentence goes) against his body? They had never seen him, and he was helpless. The second concerns the origins of this violence. Why on a Saturday evening in any province of Italy does a chat between boys turn into a fight and then into a massacre?
Many commentators have rightly emphasized Duarte’s courage, his loyalty in trying to protect Federico Zurma, his former schoolmate whom he had seen in trouble. But Duarte’s gesture is an anomaly that evening. Normality seems to be, as things have gone, an all-male violence that falls on his body like a seismic wave that had been building for hours.
It is therefore useful to try to understand how the mechanics of that violence worked and not limit ourselves to isolating the last gesture. At the origin of the fight, which is divided into several phases, there is an episode of catcalling. He also told it at the Azzurra Biasotti trial, without describing himself as a victim, but rather as fragile. She too wanted to spend an evening with her, and when it came to an end, she was leaving with her friends and her friends. “As we were about to go down the stairs”, she declared, “I notice that a guy throws me a kiss as I pass, the first thing I have to do is look down. I tried not to look at it. My friend Massimiliano Pierantoni tells my boyfriend and gets nervous ”.
The boy who throws the kiss at her is Francesco Belleggia, one of the four condemned: his gesture is the first shock of a series that with an almost material logic reaches the final explosion, the uncontrolled beating. Reconstructing all the previous dynamics there are several moments in which it seems that, in the dialectic between provocations and reactions, we can stop; but then there is still something that triggers the spiral of violence again.
In two years the common sense with respect to this story has not changed much
What this something is the process and the debate that accompanied it do not make it clear. The Bianchi brothers crudely tell a half truth to hide a whole one: their trial was in the media. They are right: they were immediately portrayed as monsters, and their murderous violence was linked to martial arts or drug use. They are combinations that explain nothing.
Rather, we should understand how such ferocious and all-male violence is generated in boys in their early twenties. If we limit ourselves to reasoning about the intentionality of individuals, we lose sight of the complexity of the reasons: in these situations there is a group and a context of reference in which that gesture and that action have a certain meaning, a certain value.
Alessandro Coltrè, a journalist from Artena, the town where the four culprits lived, was there that evening. He was among the few to reflect coldly on what happened: “It is difficult to make those who were not born here understand what it means to live, as males, in the province in the twenties, ie in the years of globalization, social networks, EasyJet. The province does not exist in the imagination. If you watch TV, internet, there is always only the city. And being male in the province means living torn between two opposing forces: reproducing a traditional culture that somehow protects you from the ferocity of social exclusion and imagining yourself in an elsewhere which, however, in most cases will never be found “.
For Willy Duarte that elsewhere was death, for those guilty of his murder decades in jail.
This article appeared in issue 35 of the Essential, page 4.