Il regime ostativo: un simbolo intoccabile?

The paper concerns the controversy about the permanence of the special obstructive regime denying access to penitentiary rewards and the 41 -bis detention in the Italian penitentiary sys- tem. The reflection begins with the criminal and p olitical origins underlying these borderline in- stitutes; then , large spaces are dedicated to the suspicions of constitutional and conventional in- compatibility of these regimes, accompanied by the analysis of the Italian constitutional and Strasbourg jurisprudence, especially on the (abstract) reducibility of impriso nment without pa- role . Final reflections are dedicated to the latest events in the Italian peninsula: on the one hand, the Alfredo Cospito’s case, first anarchist subjected to the 41-bis regime, on the other hand, the most recent changes to imprisonment wit hout parole , made by the heterogeneous Decree-Law No. 162/2022.