Eros Di Ronza.
Dying from a punch of scratch cards. The death in Milan of the thirty-seven-year-old Eros Di Ronza marks another dark chapter in the Italian news, where the distinction between defense and revenge becomes increasingly subtle. The scene is that of an Italy that is now accustomed to the worst: a closed place, a desperate man trying to steal, a bartender running down from his home, perhaps moved by fear, more likely by fury and anger. The victim, according to initial reconstructions, attempted to force the shutter of a bar, together with an accomplice who was still on the run, to carry out a robbery.
But what happens next isn’t defending your life, it isn’t protecting a family under threat. According to initial investigations, the owner of the bar shot him to death outside his place, finding only bundles of scratch cards in the robber’s hands. A cheap loot, a broken life. Yet, there are those who would like to label all this under the great umbrella of “legitimate defense”, as if every violent action, simply because it occurs in response to a crime, could be justified. No, there is no real threat to the bartender’s life here. Di Ronza was a robber, of course, but unarmed, without that imminent danger that the law requires to speak of self-defense.
The bar owner will be questioned by the Prosecutor’s Office, who will evaluate the circumstances and the testimonies collected, many of which come from compatriots of the bartender himself, perhaps present at the time of the tragedy. But even from the first investigations, an abuse of force seems to clearly emerge, an escalation of private violence that finds no justification either in laws or in morality. Outside the premises remain the signs of a miserable robbery, a symbol of the empty hope in which millions of miserable people take refuge every day, and a lifeless body. Di Ronza is not an innocent victim, but neither is he a monster to be executed in the street. When will we understand that justice is not something we can take with our own hands? And then there is Milan. Its suburbs have become an urban Wild West, where the state dissolves into the shadows and violence dictates its rules, leaving citizens alone to compete for survival. In this context of degradation and abandonment, there is a risk of legitimizing brutality as the only means of defense. But a city that relies on do-it-yourself justice is a city that has failed, even before the investigations begin.