The Art of Law — Antonio Albanese aka Rigel Bellombra

A legal scholar and an artist: You are known both as Antonio Albanese and as Rigel Bellombra. How did these two identities emerge, and how do they meet today?

For many years, I thought I was living two parallel lives. One was the life of Antonio Albanese: a professor of private law, a lawyer and a legal scholar. The other was the life of Rigel Bellombra: a writer of poems, songs, plays and screenplays. Gradually, however, I realised that both were asking the same questions about justice, vulnerability and the human condition, simply through different languages.

Teaching was crucial to this discovery. Legal education must also cultivate imagination, empathy and the ability to see a problem from more than one perspective. Legal interpretation, the balancing of interests and the application of general clauses all require an imaginative effort.

This is also why civil law occupies such an important place in my artistic work. Cinema or literature seem naturally attracted to criminal law—to crimes, investigations and trials—but criminal law usually enters only at the end of the story. The deeper conflict often begins much earlier, in a broken family relationship, a betrayed promise, an inheritance, a failure of care or trust. Behind many crimes lies, in some sense, a failure of civil law.

This awareness eventually led me to create Falling in Law: a community in which legal scholarship, university education and artistic creation can meet. It is also the place where Antonio Albanese and Rigel Bellombra finally cease to be separate identities. Today, I see the jurist and the artist as two voices engaged in the same search: understanding human relationships and finding forms capable of making them more visible.

What is your understanding of humour? And how does it influence your work?

I have never regarded humour as the opposite of seriousness. On the contrary, I believe it is one of its highest expressions. Humour introduces proportion where power tends to become absolute.

Perhaps this explains why my first novel, The Abrogation of Love, took the form of a political satire and a dystopia. Reality had become so paradoxical that fiction seemed the most credible way to describe it. Humour allowed me to speak about power, law and society with a freedom that a purely realistic narrative would probably have lost. Sometimes exaggeration tells the truth more faithfully than literal description.

Even when I later turned to noir fiction, in The Murderer Within Us, I realised that I could not renounce humour. Secondary characters often became unexpected bearers of irony. That was not a stylistic choice so much as a reflection of life itself. Human existence is never entirely tragic or entirely comic. It is a continuous coexistence of dignity and absurdity, suffering and ridicule, reality and fiction. We rarely know where one ends and the other begins.

Perhaps this also explains the spirit of Falling in Law. By bringing law into dialogue with literature, theatre, cinema and music, we acknowledge that no single language is sufficient to understand the human condition. Humour is one of those languages. It prevents truth from hardening into dogma. Following a profoundly Spinozian intuition, later developed by Gilles Deleuze, I believe that joy is not the opposite of intellectual seriousness but one of its highest expressions. A joyful mind remains open, curious and capable of creating new connections. That is also the atmosphere I hope to cultivate within Falling in Law.

Cruelty seems to reappear throughout human history despite every ethical effort to overcome it. Has it played a role in your work?

Very much so, although perhaps not in the way one might expect.

I grew up in Calabria during the 1980s, a land where extraordinary beauty and violence seemed to compete for the same space. On the one hand, there were the sea, the mountains, the generosity of ordinary people and a deep sense of community. On the other, there was the persistent presence of organised crime and the awareness that human dignity could be violated in the most brutal ways. I believe that I was shaped by this permanent contrast. It taught me that beauty is one of the strongest forms of resistance to cruelty.

As a private law scholar, I have often reflected on the fact that law alone cannot eradicate violence. Cruelty begins not only when people are physically harmed, but also when they cease to be recognised in their full humanity. For this reason, I have never regarded artistic creation as an escape from legal scholarship. It is another way of investigating the same reality. Whether I write a screenplay, a song or a theatrical piece, I find myself returning to the same question: how can we make people feel what legal concepts alone are often unable to express?

This conviction also lies behind Falling in Law. I have gradually come to believe that peace cannot be built only through institutions and treaties; it also requires imagination, beauty and shared cultural experiences. That is why our network brings together scholars, students and artists from every continent, encouraging them to create together. One of our recent projects, for example, is the collective song Straniero, in which different voices and languages become a single appeal for dialogue and peace.

Perhaps this is why I have increasingly come to think of law itself as an art. Like every authentic art, at its best, it is a creative human endeavour aimed at transforming conflict into coexistence, and violence into justice.

Are there any classics—and perhaps some more recent works—that you would recommend to readers interested in the themes explored in this blog?

Rather than recommending a list of books, films or musical works, I would prefer to mention a few sentences.

After many years of studying, teaching and writing about law, I have become convinced that a single sentence can change a person's life. A provision in a code, a constitutional principle or a judicial decision may alter someone's destiny. But a sentence from a novel, a film or a song can do the same. It may quietly accompany us for decades, transforming the way we understand ourselves and others.

One sentence that has never left me comes from Giorgio Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and was later echoed in Vittorio De Sica's film adaptation: "To understand life, one must die at least once." It suggests that genuine understanding often begins when our certainties collapse and we are forced to see the world through different eyes.

Another is one of the most beautiful legal ideas ever expressed, by Cicero in his defence speech Pro Cluentio: "Legum denique idcirco omnes servi sumus ut liberi esse possimus"—"In the end, we are all servants of the laws so that we may be free." More than two thousand years later, I still regard this as one of the finest definitions of the rule of law: freedom is not the absence of law but one of its greatest achievements.

A third sentence accompanies me whenever I think about the relationship between law and the arts. Prince Myshkin, in Dostoevsky's The Idiot, tells us that "Beauty will save the world." I have always liked to remember that the Russian word mir has also meant "peace". Whether or not Dostoevsky intended that resonance, I find it deeply meaningful: beauty may not only save the world, but also help us imagine peace. This is one of the reasons why I believe that law and the arts should never be separated.

A different kind of reflection comes from contemporary music. In one of his songs, Francesco De Gregori repeats the disarmingly simple sentence: "Non c'è niente da capire" ("There is nothing to understand"). At first sight, it almost sounds like a rejection of interpretation. I hear exactly the opposite. Great art does not ask us all to understand the same thing; it invites each of us to experience it differently, according to our own life, culture and sensibility. Here, perhaps, lies one of the deepest differences between art and law. Law seeks interpretations that can be shared because social peace depends on a common understanding of norms. Art, by contrast, flourishes through the plurality of meanings it awakens. Nietzsche reminded us that the truths on which societies rely are necessary human constructions rather than absolute realities. Law cannot renounce those shared truths, because without them coexistence would be impossible. Yet art constantly reminds us that they remain historical, fragile and open to transformation.

Finally, I would like to end with a very recent cinematic question. Not long ago, together with the Art. 34 students of Falling in Law, I had the privilege of meeting Paolo Sorrentino and discussing with him the relationship between justice and art after the screening of La Grazia. The film revolves around a question that continues to accompany me: "Whose are our dreams?"

I will not reveal the answer that the film eventually offers, partly because I would not wish to deprive anyone of that discovery, but above all because I believe this is one of the essential tasks of art. Art does exists to preserve meaningful questions. Law, of course, cannot stop at questions alone. Society asks it to decide. Yet good legal answers are impossible without good questions.

Perhaps this is the deepest lesson that art offers to law: before every answer comes a question, and before every rule comes a human story.