The day I graduated, my dad was waiting for me outside the door to the classroom where I presented my thesis. His exact words were: “Now you can begin your studies”.
That’s how Dad was. He was never satisfied with achievements, he never sat back to enjoy a success, he was always ready to seek improvement, perfection, that thing he felt was missing in order to take the next step.
Dad taught me that being a lawyer required both heart and science. Heart because he was committed to and suffered with his clients, taking on every problem and sharing it with the people he served. Science because he studied without “ever trusting to memory” (as he told me over and over).
He has now passed the torch to us.
He had three great passions: music, aviation and law, all driven by boundless curiosity and cultivated with great humility to the very end.
Always ready to see an issue from a different perspective – either his advocate’s or his adversary’s – with the awareness that “if the power of mathematics is that it’s not an opinion, the power of the law is precisely that it is an opinion” according to a principle dear to Prof. Satta.
When deadlines were tight, when a problem seemed unsolvable, when anyone would have been discouraged, Francesco Rocco di Torrepadula – “Lawyer Rocco” – said to me: “Parsifal, get to your gun!”
And so, together in the trenches, behind the computer screen, we began to study, discuss and write, and within this timeless space, typing away, what once seemed impossible would gradually take shape. So many theses, so many antitheses, and finally a shared synthesis. He knew how to pull a successful argument from an idea, from a simple intuition, with the same skill and apparent simplicity of a master sculptor drawing out the soul of a rough stone.
A tireless scholar, always seeking perfection, chasing the form to convey the most effective message. “Form is substance!” he told me over and over again.
An upright man, an immensely cultured, gallant man who was altruistic and generous in both his life and his profession. UAn old-fashioned gentleman. A lover of classical music, aviation and the universe, “Lawyer Rocco” was a second father to me, a loving, expert guide who gave me the privilege of standing by his side, who saw me as his equal, sharing joys and sorrows, with incomparable humility..
