Gomorrah, Part One

Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah depicts an Italy which criminal economics and the race for profit has stripped from the R/romantic mythos swathing the country of Rome and Renaissance, fine wine and high fashion, the ancient world and revitalized women in mid-life crises. Instead, Naples and the cities and neighborhoods haloing its dirty high-rises and skyscrapers constitute the central location of massive death tolls, experiments on heroin addicts, containers of Chinese corpses en route to home graves, red carpet-worthy sweatshops, and girls who catch boys as a career, landing young Mafiosi whose salaries go to girlfriends in case of death or imprisonment. Powerful families locked in deadly vendettas are not new to Italy, but the family-based mafias of Gomorrah’s exposé don’t provide the backdrop to a tragic love affair with poisons and daggers. The Mafias of the Di Lauro, La Monica, Quadrano, et cetera, families are reinforced with AK-47s. What is most striking about Saviano’s account is not the violence, though the violence is grisly, callous, and overwhelming; rather, it’s that the Camorra is at its basis an economic endeavor, a confederation of families committed to financial endeavors who turn criminal in order to cheat a failing system and who have, amidst incalculable murders, actually in some ways benefitting the Italian economy. In Part One of Gomorrah, Saviano impresses upon his readers the economic weight of the Camorra and the ways in which this dominance directly leads to Southern Italy as a mass grave.