Gomorrah, Part Two

The second part of Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah delves into the mythos underlying not only the Camorra, but also the mythos underlying Saviano’s own resistance of the mafia. Saviano refers to the archetypal Don Peppino Diana and a young, female schoolteacher, both people in Camorra-owned southern Italy who defied and made declarations against the mafia. Saviano repeatedly calls on the power of “the word” as he brings his account to a close, detailing a visit to the grave of Pier Paolo Pasolini and invoking his 1974 “I Know” political speech. Saviano’s travelling to Pasolini’s grave, along with his accounts of Don Peppino Diana and other defiant figures, calls forth the power of a resistant Italy, a space of inspiration. In this way, Saviano waxes Romantic. The Camorra likewise delves into history, art, and film. One of the most striking lines of Part Two is in the chapter “Hollywood”: “It’s not the movie world that scans the criminal world for the most interesting behavior. The exact opposite is true” (250). The Camorra is not only the direct offspring of fierce economic competition and class inequality, but Hollywood. Saviano reveals an Italy built from inaccurate representations of inaccurate representations, simulacrum. The Camorra is hyper-real and much of its power seems embedded in that pure mythos of The Godfather, Goodfellas, Scarface, and Tarantino. Saviano also speaks of the real, the dead, both human and ecological, that result from this potent mixture of the economic and filmic hyper-real, systems with no basis in reality that destroy the real and tangible.

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.

Don't Look Now

Italy is the setting of choice for many narratives that turn on sinister incidents. Daphne Du Maurier’s short story “Don’t Look Now” utilizes Italy as space not only for murder, but the supernatural and absurd. Italy, Venice more specifically, is a site for the return of the dead and premonitions of death in the text, as twin Scottish spinsters see John and Laura’s recently deceased daughter and John sees a moment that will take place after his own death. John and Laura believe they are on a holiday in Italy in order to escape their own tragic history through submersion in a much grander historical narrative, but this site of antiquity only serves to remind them of the personal, in such a way that leads John to his end. Because of the dwarf murderess’s childlike appearance and the loss of a young daughter, John thinks he will redemptively save a child’s life and instead only dies his “silly” death. This text seems to reject the popular conception of Italy as a tourist site where visitors from less old and more developed countries can come to be cleansed in the fount of sanitized, museumized history. Instead, Italy ends those who insist on using it in such a way and Italy’s history only reinforces their own, even using their history against them.

Daisy Miller

Henry James’s Daisy Miller depicts a set of characters, Winterbourne and the Miller family, in two distinct European settings: Vevey, Switzerland and Rome, Italy. The behavior of this cast of characters does not dramatically differ from location to location, but the opportunity to demonstrate character is vastly different between Vevey and Rome. The society that surrounds remains the same, especially in that it focuses its disapprobation on Daisy’s liberality, specifically in regard to gentlemen friends. Winterbourne refers to Daisy as “an American flirt,” connoting that this is her behavior at home as well as abroad, but I wonder if the Rome of this text figures as a space of opportunity for indiscretion and the transgression of social boundaries. The novella shows that regardless of the oceans or national borders that the Miller family crosses, “society” remains fixed, though, especially in Rome, this society seems to find it far more difficult to maintain its usual punishments for unacceptable behavior. This society is structured as a panopticon whose surveillance never fails. Rome, however, is a space where Daisy’s misadventures can become tragic and therefore forgivable. I wonder if Daisy dies of the “Roman fever” because Rome resists this type of tourism. I see Daisy as viewing her adventures as delightfully scandalous, but in the context of Rome, her behavior is hardly impressive. Daisy Miller’s ending honestly stunned me, and I still haven’t really been able to formulate my thoughts on the text in light of it. I know there’s also this idea of artifice and authenticity at the crux of the novella. I can see some Daisy Miller in some of the moments here on our trip.

The Cask of Amontillado/Rappaccini's Daughter

Italy is a site of competition, revenge, and friendship/courtship gone awry in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” “The Cask of Amontillado” really only depicts an Italian wine cellar and a limited view of the relationship between two “friends,” the story focusing on the narrator’s fatal payback of an untold slight, using a rare cask of wine as leverage to draw Fortunado into the cellar where the speaker can wall him up alive. Pride seems to be the point here, showing an Italy where pride over perceived insults can turn into murder and where pride over wine can turn to fatal folly. The Italian setting of “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is not much broader, though its primary location of a luscious and deadly garden is highly suggestive, especially when combined with medicine and study. Italy’s beauty is famous; it is a space of verdant and floral landscapes, lush vineyards, mountains, the ocean…but Italy is also very often figured as a dangerous, passionately mad space as well. Fitting in with Roderick Cavaliero’s reading of the English perception of Italy in the early 19^th century, Italy’s immodest, exorbitant beauty must also lack virtue. The point of the tragic demise of Beatrice Rappaccini (and Giovanni) and the conclusion of the tale is an insignificant rivalry. Italy seems to be a space where people allow their passions to get the best of them, resulting in jealousy, avarice, elaborate plots, and consequently, murder. Thus, Italy almost figures as an exorcism of all things that go against propriety, hinging on beauty and beautiful things.

The Italian

The Italy of Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian is an Italy of high, courtly romance, hierarchy that calls for transgression, pride, and insidious clergy. The Italian takes Naples as its setting, a location with a long history of criminal intentions. The main physical points of focus are Villa Altieri, the palace of the Vivaldis, and the ruins of a Roman fort, as well as the frame narrative that takes place in the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Pianto. The Villa Altieri becomes the stage for a forbidden love and a suspicious death. Likewise, the ruins of the Roman fort become a space where Vincentio Vivaldi encounters a ghostly presence. The Vivaldi palace is a space of precarious power, threatened by the attraction of a sole heir to a marquisate to an orphaned and virtuous beauty. The cathedral occupying the beginning of the story, however, is more interesting. In The Italian, the cathedrals house assassins just as a monk’s robe can hide a duplicitous and foul man. Ultimately, Radcliffe’s text depicts Italy as a dangerous, radical space that threatens to topple a hierarchy based on nobility and the good reputation of the church and its leaders. Italy is thus a deeply sentimental and passionate space in Radcliffe’s The Italian.