“I don’t have unequivocal answers and I’m suspicious of anyone who claims they do. Many questions that are 124presented to those who exercise our professions – defence counsel, prosecutor, judge – don’t have unequivocal answers.

“I come at last to my conclusion. Our task is to find solutions to the cases with which we are presented. But we need to be aware that the ability to find answers and solutions to conflicts is based on our ability to live with uncertainty, with the opaqueness of reality.

“The English poet John Keats called this ‘negative capability’. He thought this was the essential talent that man required to obtain genuine results, to really solve problems. Keats called this capability ‘negative’ in opposition to the attitude of those who tackle problems in search of immediate solutions, in an attempt to bend reality to their own need for certainties.

“Looking for an immediate unequivocal interpretation from which to derive an immediate and reassuring solution is, in most cases, an automatic reflex and ultimately a device to avoid having to think.

“For Keats, by accepting uncertainty, error and doubt, it’s possible to look more deeply, to catch details and shades of meaning, to ask new, even paradoxical questions, and in this way to expand the borders of knowledge and awareness.

“My grandfather taught philosophy. When I was little he often said something – I don’t know if it was his or a quotation, and I’ve never wanted to check – that I only really understood when he’d been dead for some time. It went more or less like this: in every activity, in every kind of work, it’s useful from time to time to take a statement we’ve always taken for granted and turn it into a question.”

I paused for a moment. Nobody seemed distracted, nobody was checking his or her phone. A slight shiver went through 125me. Maybe it was that memory of my grandfather, which hadn’t been in my notes and which had come out without my realizing it, like a distant, glowing echo.

“Thank you for listening to me, and good luck.”

Cotturri was the first to applaud, and the others followed. Some with enthusiasm, others out of politeness.

For some, the speech they had just heard was a defence lawyer’s spiel, a way of dreaming up more or less sophisticated obstacles to the possibility – the mission – of going out into the world, righting wrongs and doing justice. At all costs. Needless to say, these missionaries are those who share with idiots the record for the largest amount of damage caused, some of it irreparable.

I was by the door, saying goodbye, when the young woman with grey eyes came up to me. Looking straight at me, she gave me her hand; her handshake was as I expected, serious and firm.

“Thank you, Avvocato, it was … stimulating,” she said with a hint of a smile.

Cotturri walked me to the stairs.