Scientific Direction
Atty. Maria Virgilio

In collaboration with:
Prof. Toni Rovatti, for historical-political aspects
Prof. Pina Lalli, for the media communication sector

Researchers
Giulia Carati
Bluanna Baccarin

The opportunity was provided by the reorganization, ordering, and cataloging of trial files (including extra-procedural materials) and documentation folders held at the law firm of Maria Virgilio, a lawyer of the Bologna Bar.
The following proceedings from the archives of the Virgilio law firm were selected for analysis in this project:

• Trial for procured abortion against Gigliola Pierobon, I. S., and R. C. – Court of Padua, 1973
• Trial for defamation against Violetta Ferrioli and Valentino Parlato – Court of Ferrara, 1975-1984
• Trial for embezzlement against N.R., S.C. – Court of Ferrara, 1975-1983
• Trial for negligence and personal injury against N.R., V.F., B.E. – Court of Ferrara, 1979-1984
• Trial for procured abortion, unauthorized practice of the medical profession, and criminal conspiracy against Conciani, Spadaccia, Faccio and Bonino, S. G., and others – Court of Florence, 1975-1991
• Trial for harassment and personal injury against L.A. – Court of Bologna, 1977-1979
• Trial for infanticide against M.G. – Court of Bologna, 1978
• Procedure for request for voluntary termination of pregnancy (VTP) before the Guardianship Judge – Court of Bologna, 1978
• Trial for rape and abduction for the purpose of lust against D.S. – Juvenile Court of Bologna, 1983-1987
• Trial for roadblock and trespassing against H.K. and others – Court of Ragusa, 1983-1984 and Court of Bologna 1984-1985
• Trial for abuse of office and rape against L.G. – Court of Cremona, 1990-1996

In all the aforementioned proceedings, Atty. Virgilio served as defense counsel, except in the proceeding against Gigliola Pierobon, for which a folder with the relevant documentation is present in the archive.

Each file has been digitized and indexed to make the component documents accessible if necessary. This material remains bound by the professional secrecy of the legal archive.
Digitization has allowed for the creation of a summary sheet for each of the proceedings (anonymous, except for the cases of Pierobon and Simeoni, which gained public historical notoriety, also by the will of the protagonists).
This sheet describes each procedural (and political) event. The template used contains the following entries:

• Summary identification title.
• Trial details
• The Fact
• Charge
• Defense
• Procedural steps
• Political entities involved
• Period press
• Activist press

The sheet concludes with a list of attachments, selected from the most significant of the case. The selected attachments have been anonymized.

Those trials were consciously “political” trials, in the sense of moving beyond the traditional logic of the “technical” trial. Within the national legal profession, a network of female and male lawyers was effectively formed—at the time, women were referred to as “avvocato” or “avvocatessa”—who were known exponents of militant activism and open to defensive strategies and tactics that were not strictly technical, to be developed and discussed collectively in places other than the law firm. In Bologna, a group was formed called the “Legal Political Collective,” which operated until 1979; a similar experience was that of Soccorso Rosso in Milan.

An important common thread was also that of the political groups that participated in those trials in various ways. We refer here mainly to the Groups for Wages for Housework and its activists in Padua and Ferrara. At the Pierobon trial in Padua, all the women in the courtroom shouted “I had an abortion too”; some were detained and charged. Their names reappear among the witnesses and protagonists of the subsequent Ferrara trials.

The defensive strategies aimed to contextualize individual events, transforming them from individual to collective ones. Through a written brief/memorandum filed with the court (and publicized outside the trial), the defense requested the Court to admit testimony from members of the cultural and scientific world and the production of written texts to prove the public and therefore political dimension of issues relating to the self-determination of the female body, both regarding reproductive choices and the sphere of sexuality. In some of those defense briefs, volumes and reflections by Elvira Badaracco herself are cited, to whom the Foundation of the same name, responsible for this Project, is dedicated.

The Rights in Motion Project—within the framework of the particular archival sensitivity of the Elvira Badaracco Foundation, Women’s Studies and Documentation—constitutes only a very first step in research and reflection on legal feminism. Through the visibility of this first series of materials, the Project intends to provide an initial opportunity, committing not only to continuing and deepening this work but also hoping for other direct perspectives on the documentation offered to historical memory.