After a long season in which the need for reordering the justice system resulted in multiple decriminalising laws, the persisting need for renovating the penal system seems to require something different than mere radical elision of penal sanctions, that is, of the instruments through which the response of the penal system should be adjusted to the peculiarity of the typified act in its concrete realisation.
We wanted, therefore, to assess, in the first place, whether in the logic of a penal system inspired to the principle of necessary harmfulness, whereby the crime shall consist of harm to a legal good, significant margins of functioning of the penal irrelevance of the fact were possible.
The study of the irrelevance clauses already established in our penal system, in juvenile trial and in the proceedings before the justice of the peace, together with the solutions adopted in other European systems, allowed us to develop a critical analysis of the new cause of exclusion of punishability for particular triviality of the fact, as introduced in the penal code.
The legislator located the new cause of non-punishability in a context certainly characterised by harmfulness, save the following punitive waiver by the judge. The triviality of the criminal fact is therefore assumed as criterion of selection, on a concrete level, of facts not deserving to be penalized.
The research, therefore, moved on to the analysis of the several "indexes of triviality" that characterise the fact as petty, in both the objective and subjective element.
We noticed then how the "threads" of petty crimes and of the irrelevant fact are intertwined, precisely, in the logic of introducing in the penal system instruments to individuate in the lesser concrete seriousness of criminal offences the reason for giving up the application of a sanction through mechanisms of extinction of punishability. The research, also through a comparative approach, has been further extended to the exam of the influence of post-factum reparatory behaviours on the harmful dimension of crime, coming to detect in the practically inexistent consideration of such behaviours, the most lacking element of the present law. A missed occasion to pave the way to a conciliatory and reparative penal justice conceived as the most advanced frontier for an adequate response to crimes of low and medium seriousness, capable of remedying the penal inflation and of giving appropriate value to a gradualist conception of crime, as well as to the dimension of penal "triviality"
