Paola Di Nicola was born in 1966 in Offida, in the province of Ascoli Piceno.
The daughter of a well-known anti-terrorism magistrate, her “bulky guide”, as she defines him in her book, she grew up surrounded by her father’s colleagues, who used to come to his house enjoying her mother’s “timballo di scrippelle.” Some of them died under the lead mafia and terrorism “to make our democracy complete.” Her experience in this family, in the shadow of the only possible model for a magistrate, the male one, pushed her to follow in her father’s footsteps, not imagining that the uniform of a magistrate “could change from man to woman.“
Currently Paola Di Nicola works at the Criminal Court of Rome and is backed by her experience as a magistrate in the field of civil, criminal and labor law, and as a judge in civil matters, real estate and criminal executions. She was also in charge of the training of the judiciary in Lazio; between 2009 and 2010 Di Nicola chaired the Board, specially set up at the Court of Naples, for the waste emergency in Campania. She has been published in several judicial magazines about immigration, the environment, urban planning, and crimes against women.
With La Giudice, a book halfway between biography and collective history of women in the judiciary, she made her literary debut.