The rediscovered voice of a leading figure of the Italian Republic. The National Edition of the Works of Aldo Moro

Moro was one of the key figures in the history of the Italian Republic, yet his rich and complex political and intellectual legacy remains relatively little known. Public perceptions of him are still largely shaped by his tragic death at the hands of the Red Brigades. The “Moro case” has generated an endless bibliography, numerous collections of documents, and reconstructions of every kind, leaving questions and uncertainties that persist to this day. As Renato Moro, President of the National Edition, aptly observed, we are faced with a “paradoxical interpretive projection backward, linked to the tendency to read the Moro affair starting from its end rather than from its beginning.”

Moro was many things: president of the Catholic University Students’ Federation, a brilliant intellectual, a journalist, a professor of criminal law and philosophy of law, secretary and president of the Christian Democratic Party, and, on several occasions, a government minister and prime minister. In the collective imagination, however, he remains above all the Christian Democratic leader held captive by the Red Brigades.

Hence the Edition’s two objectives. The first is civic: to fully restore Moro’s voice, beyond the prejudices and stereotypes imposed by political controversy and the tragic circumstances of his death. It is grounded in the conviction that the fifty-five days of his captivity cannot overshadow more than sixty years of his life, and that Moro during his captivity can be understood only in light of the values and commitments that had long guided him. The second objective is scholarly: to provide the academic community with a complete digital critical edition of both published and unpublished texts, carefully reconstructing their history and development.

When the Ministry of Cultural Heritage established the National Edition of the Works of Aldo Moro in 2016, on the centenary of his birth, not even a complete catalog of his writings existed. Scholars and the general public can now draw on a philologically rigorous edition: eight volumes and approximately 10,000 pages, freely accessible through a digital platform developed by the University of Bologna. A significant portion consists of previously unpublished or long-forgotten material. Thanks to the work of a large, multigenerational team of scholars, the Edition now offers a genuinely historical perspective on the Christian Democratic leader, helping to move beyond many of the generalizations that have accumulated around his work.

The project is the result of collaboration among numerous cultural and academic institutions, including FBK. From the outset, FBK’s Digital Humanities group contributed its expertise in the design of digital editions and the extraction and visualization of information from textual data, while researchers at the Italian-German Historical Institute prepared critical editions of several volumes.

I worked on Moro’s philosophical and legal writings from the 1940s, which include a significant unpublished work: the lectures on the philosophy of law that he delivered at the University of Bari in 1940–41. These complex reflections on law and the state, written while the Fascist regime was still in power, already contain, in nuce, the emphasis on the centrality of the individual and the idea of community that Moro would bring, a few years later, to the work of the Constituent Assembly. Chiara Zampieri, currently a postdoctoral researcher at ISIG, edited the volume bringing together writings from 1973 to 1978, conveying the complexity of a political experience too often reduced to stereotypical formulas.

One of the hallmarks of Moro’s personality, as former President of the Constitutional Court Marta Cartabia recalled during the presentation, was a constant, never fully satisfied tension—an almost desperate search for balance between opposing forces in a society undergoing profound transformation. At the heart of his commitment, and the true driving force behind both his intellectual thought and political action, was his attachment to the human dimension: to the values of the individual, of life, and of community.

Perhaps it is precisely this unresolved tension that gives coherence to Moro’s entire journey—a journey that we can now retrace through his own words, thanks to the digital edition of his writings and speeches.