Giustizia di pietra: la città tra stigma e memoria

The essay examines how, between the Middle Ages and the early modern period, European cities became “theatres of justice”, turning urban space into a punitive device through shame stones, pillars of justice, and monuments of judicial memory. Drawing on emblematic case studies (Rome, Florence, Naples, Bari, Milan, and smaller Abruzzese towns), it explores how infamy functioned not only as a legal sanction but as a public, visual spectacle embedded in the cityscape. These architectures of shame as well as the so-called “speaking statues”, often placed in key urban locations, acted as tools of political, social, and aesthetic communication. The article adopts an interdisciplinary approach, combining legal history, art history, and spatial theory, to interrogate how punitive practices shaped urban identity. Today, such stones and columns endure as material traces of collective memory, challenging us to reflect on the spatial legacies of punishment and the urban inscription of justice and exclusion.