Palazzo di Giustizia (il Palazzaccio)

Guglielmo Calderini won the design competition, which Giuseppe Zanardelli chaired. The Court of Cassation states that the first stone was laid on 14 March 1889, in the presence of King Umberto I and Queen Margherita, and that the building was inaugurated on 11 January 1911. Three sources give three different construction spans and this guide publishes neither a start nor an end date beyond those two events. Statues of fourteen jurists stand on the Tiber front and in the cortile d'onore: Giulio Paolo, Quinto Ortensio, Ulpiano, Labeone, Cicero, Gaius, Modestinus, Licinius Crassus, Salvius Julianus, Papinian, Bartolo da Sassoferrato, De Luca, Vico and Romagnosi. The Court's own history records that Calderini, broken by the commission of inquiry into the works, killed himself on 12 February 1916, and gives the crowd's nickname for the building, Palazzaccio, along with the fact that Orson Welles shot part of The Trial here. Italian Wikipedia records that the clay subsoil of the quarter forced repeated consolidation works beneath it. The Ministry of Justice's Biblioteca centrale giuridica is on the ground floor, past the main piazza Cavour entrance. The Court's own history states the library was founded before the unification of Italy, was moved here in 1996 from the ministry's premises in via Arenula into rooms that had originally housed the Corte d'Assise courtrooms, and has been a legal-deposit beneficiary since 1885. The 1889 foundation digging turned up two adjacent sarcophagi, a man and a woman with names of Greek origin, inscribed Crepereius Euhodus and Crepereia Tryphaena. The Corte di cassazione describes an ivory and amber doll among the objects found with Tryphaena, states that her skeleton is today in the Musei Capitolini, and states that the doll's hairstyle allowed archaeologists to date her to the time of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. Rome Art Lover captions its photographs of the sarcophagus and the doll to the Centrale Montemartini. The two accounts disagree and this guide does not choose between them. Roma Capitale's toponymy register carries piazza dei Tribunali under an attribution of 8 May 1885 to rione Prati, confirmed by a limit variation of 1 March 1954.