Let’s do this: That’s the title of one of his successful books. Cesare Rimini left us on October 15th at the age of 91, always carried by youthful pride and rare elegance. In his long life as a marriage lawyer, he ensured that separations and divorces were not always dramatic breaks. And not just for financial reasons. But because there are often children and grandchildren too. And lives must begin again and not be interrupted or even lost. And I have always thought that his work as a journalist, his passion for children’s literature, were not only a mark of the extraordinary humanity of his father and grandfather, but also a result of his legal experience. Rimini was an innovator of family law, the prince of marriage law, who, although his office was attached to the Palace of Justice in Milan, took care to visit it as little as possible. When you go to trial you are always defeated. There is always a way to reach an agreement. He sought it through the art of persuasion, not through the threat of legal consequences. We’ve often asked him to tell us details of famous breakups, betrayals and romances. He lured us with vague nods – he smiled smugly with a touch of sadism – but then his reserve always took over. Almost all Italian industrial and financial dynasties and beyond passed through his studio. Entertainment and sports celebrities. From Marta Marzotto to Ruud Gullit. He assisted his clients with the wisdom of a lawyer, but also with the moral integrity of a wise man. He was a born negotiator who took special care to ensure that resentment did not outweigh common sense.
Rimini had a cozy, aristocratic and popular character at the same time. Eccentric and sophisticated in his clothing (“What painting are you from today, Cesare?” I said to him jokingly), but generous with words, gestures and greetings to everyone. I’ve never seen him angry. When he became president of the Filarmonica della Scala (music one of his great passions), he said that they chose him because no one argues like artists. Rimini, a native of Mantu and an adopted Milanese, had completed his law studies at the university and then immediately began his legal practice in the office of the lawyer Arturo Orvieto in Via Cesare Battisti. His family was a Jewish family who were forced to change their last name as well to avoid persecution. The escape into the Apennines is described in another map. Mantua always remained in his heart. With cuisine in all its variations, including those that religion would prohibit. And above all with art. A great and sophisticated collector, he had gone crazy just to own the works of his favorite painter, the 18th century Mantuan painter Giuseppe Bazzani.
Rimini was a lover of beauty in all its forms. As a mountain lover, he had collected so many skier figures, real rarities, that he turned them into a sophisticated publication. And a treasured exhibition in the Engadine, which he loved with its taste of freedom according to racial laws as much as the wonderfully rough sea of Monterosso. And here too, in the Cinque Terre, he dedicated himself to growing wine for Sciacchetrà on a prohibitive sixth-degree slope. With a friend of his who had worked as a partisan courier, very skilled at fly fishing, but above all as a refugee smuggler to Switzerland. It’s all in Piero’s story. His collaboration with the Corriere lasted a long time, both for his legal comments and his notes on customs. Even an anonymous trolleybus, number 94, became the scene of small but meaningful stories from everyday life. In addition to being a great lawyer, he was also an astute and polite observer of Italian customs. He loved telling nursery rhymes to the little ones and perhaps had more fun than they did after weeding out too many parts of the adults’ broken fairy tales. Let’s leave it like this, dear Cesare, there is always a reason to smile and marvel at the beauty of life.