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Titolo: [ot] lunch with roberto saviano

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Having arranged to meet for lunch, I am told to wait in front of a 
central landmark at a certain time. The time passes; I am about to call 
when a car detaches itself from the traffic and shoots towards me. A 
man gets out, the bulge of his pistol beneath his short coat, says 
“Lloyd?”, apologises for the delay and opens the back door of the car. 
His colleague drives as we race back into the traffic and through the 
city to a hotel.
Two cars with police escorts are parked outside. I am taken in, down a 
corridor, into a white, windowless room with a little table in the 
centre set for two, a flower in a vase. A luxurious cell. By agreement 
– pressed on me courteously but insistently – I cannot divulge the name 
of the hotel here, nor even the city.
One of the police escorts waits with me: he says he decided to join the 
Carabinieri in his native Sicily “because there’s nothing for the young 
there: some of my friends joined the black economy”. Once he had passed 
a check done on his parents and grandparents – they were apparently 
untouched by crime or Mafia – he was sent to the mainland, spent some 
time in uniform, then volunteered for escort training (“though I knew 
it was more dangerous”) and was detailed to guard Roberto Saviano.
It is four years since the publication of Gomorrah, the Naples-born 
writer’s description of life under the Camorra, the Neapolitan crime 
syndicate. Part journalism, part reportage in the first person, part 
autobiography, the book is a hybrid. Vivid flashes of observation are 
juxtaposed with bitter denunciations of cruelty and indifference. 
Federico Varese, professor of criminology at the University of Oxford 
and one of the world’s foremost scholars of organised crime, says 
Saviano makes clear not just the brutality of the Camorra, but also the 
way they have their claws dug so deep into Neapolitan society (and far 
beyond). What made the book especially valuable, he says, is the way 
“he showed how they are useful to a section of the people: they provide 
credit, they allow investments in their drugs and other businesses and 
then pay interest; they will stamp on competition. And he didn’t just 
write about them as a local phenomenon: he showed how they are tied 
into global networks: he showed that they affect you and me.”
The book was a huge success – in Italy alone, a country with a 
relatively small reading public, 2m copies were sold; and in 2008 an 
extraordinary film of it was made, directed by Matteo Garrone with 
amateur Neapolitan actors, some mere children. Saviano, still in his 
20s, became nationally famous as a no-holds-barred hater of the gangs, 
a glimmer of light against their growing darkness. At the same time, it 
has meant that he has had to accept that he is a target for their 
wrath, that he has to live with the consequences of his actions.
He enters – slim, shaven-headed, a sharp, handsome but watchful face – 
and we sit. I gesture about the room: “This is how you live?” “This is 
how I live; all the time,” he replies. He has been living like this 
almost since Gomorrah was published and the Camorra said they would 
kill him. In 2008 an informer named Carmine Schiavone, a cousin of 
Francesco Schiavone, one of the Calabrian Camorra Clan dei Casalesi 
leaders, revealed details of a plan to blow up Saviano’s car as it was 
travelling between Naples and Rome.
It is, the 31-year-old acknowledges, a velvet prison: Gomorrah made him 
a rich man, while the state provides the round-the-clock surveillance. 
I recall a sentence from one of the essays in his latest book, Beauty 
and the Inferno, a collection of reflections on his life in hiding due 
to be published in Britain early next year. “I think of all the 
birthdays I have spent – anxious, sad, alone – since being forced into 
hiding to live with a police escort.” He smiles, sadly. He must move 
constantly, from flat to flat: as others in his position have found, 
once neighbours discover he is there, they complain and ask him to 
leave. The white cell in which we are to be served a delicious lunch is 
at once reward and punishment.
Yet in the outside world into which he cannot venture unprotected, the 
front pages are full of Saviano: his book, his journalism and now a 
television programme. Vieni Via Con Me (Come Away With Me) is a 
two-hour, interview-based programme on issues of contemporary 
importance, filmed at an undisclosed location surrounded by security, 
and Saviano’s main role is to deliver a monologue of nearly half an 
hour, straight to the camera, on a subject of his choice. “It’s a slow 
talk,” he says, “certainly not the kind of thing you’d normally see on 
TV, especially not on Italian TV.”
An early episode, in which he claimed the southern clans now held sway 
over large parts of the economy of the north, caused uproar. The show, 
on the state TV channel, RAI 3 – traditionally a protected space for 
the left and thus not under the influence of prime minister Silvio 
Berlusconi, but with generally low ratings – got 8m viewers on its 
first airing, and 9m on its second. I congratulate Saviano: he is 
proud, saying it was RAI 3’s biggest audience since its creation in 
1979, then instantly qualifies this achievement, saying: “But the 
hatred it has caused! From the political class. It’s a hatred you see 
everywhere in Italy – towards those who stand up and try to counter the 
prevailing climate. Really, a hatred.”
Saviano describes this reaction as la macchina del fango, “the mud 
machine”, a phrase that has caught on in Italy. As our first course 
arrives – the choice has been made for us, a delicious risotto with 
prawns, served with a light white wine – I ask him what he means by it. 
“It is the instinctive reaction, not just of politicians but of the 
society. Look how [Giovanni] Falcone and [Paolo] Borsellino [the 
anti-Mafia procurators murdered by the Sicilian Mafia in 1992] were 
treated – they were blamed, vilified, because their actions showed up 
the indifference of the political class and of society.”
For Saviano, second only to his loathing of organised crime is his fury 
about a subject Borsellino referred to in his speech at Falcone’s 
funeral, two months before his own – “the foulness of moral compromise, 
of indifference, of ... complicity”. Saviano says it is the tactic of 
the powerful “to confer legitimacy on those who conform, to encourage 
or even initiate the workings of ‘the mud machine’ to those who 
threaten their rule”.
The waiter, deferential and a little nervous, is back soon with the 
main course: sea bass wrapped about a filling of chopped vegetables, 
then steamed in canisters and served in two little columns, with small 
potatoes. Saviano, who has been animated for the first part of our 
meeting, with a ready smile and laugh, now lapses more often into short 
silences, his answers shorter, his eyes downcast. I ask him to talk 
about his family and friends but he declines to follow me there. He 
suffers from depression; his style of life intensifies this. His fame 
and the courage he showed in achieving it has opened doors and 
introduced him to an Italian – and world – cultural elite: but they 
have also robbed him of the ordinary activities of a young man. He 
talks, as he has in the past, of leaving Italy for a more secure 
location, where “the mud machine” will not contaminate him. I ask him 
whether, as some speculation has it, he will enter politics. “No, 
certainly not. It is not because I think all politics and politicians 
are venal: certainly, some are corrupt but I know many who work as well 
as they can to improve the country. But writing is what I am.”
He acknowledges, however, that he has been taken up by the Italian 
left: his show is on the leftist channel, much of his journalism is for 
La Repubblica, a centre-left daily. Yet he is not a natural or 
ideological leftist. Among influences he mentions in conversation – he 
studied philosophy at university, his reading is wide and he has fewer 
diversions from books than most – are the anarchist Errico Malatesta; 
southern writers he thinks unjustly neglected, such as the 
anti-fascists Gaetano Salvemini and Giustino Fortunato; conservative 
German writers Carl Schmitt and Ernst Jünger, and even pro-fascist 
authors such as Ezra Pound and the Italian Julius Evola. Yet he 
describes himself as a liberal, while admitting “in Italy the liberal 
strand is weak and thin; it was crushed between the two great forces of 
Christian democracy and communism”.
He knew from an early age, he says, that he had to write, to bear 
witness to the criminality about him. His upbringing in Naples was in a 
middle-class household, headed by his father Luigi, a doctor, and his 
Jewish mother, Miriam. Yet all about him was the Camorra, a sprawling, 
clan-based criminal fraternity with roots at least 200 years old. They 
control the milk and fish industries, the coffee trade, and more than 
2,500 bakeries in the city. They also control waste management and 
battles over control of this lucrative trade have sporadically seen 
rubbish pile up on Neapolitan streets over the past three years.
As an adolescent, Saviano saw his father severely beaten for assisting 
a Camorra victim: the “rule” was that such a person should be left to 
die. His father, however, professed respect for the men of power, 
counselling his son to be strong, like the Camorra bosses. More 
influential may have been an anti-Camorra priest, Don Peppino, who gets 
a chapter in Gomorrah, and was killed by those he denounced. Saviano 
remembers the priest telling him one who opposed the clans had to be 
“there to accuse and to testify ... [using] the word with its only 
defence: speaking out”.
Saviano has followed that advice and it has given him his extraordinary 
prominence. He is strongly there in everything he writes; and now, 
still more strongly, in his TV show. “I think writing of the kind I do 
must make an impression because it is a narrative, which is how people 
are engaged in it. The story is carried not just by the facts. It must 
be literature as well as fact.”
His writing has catapulted him into the upper aristocracy of letters: 
invited to a ceremony two years ago at the Nobel Committee in 
Stockholm, he met the writer Salman Rushdie, who incurred an Iranian 
fatwa for his “blasphemous” 1988 novel The Satanic Verses and for years 
had police protection. Both writers gave lectures on “Freedom of Speech 
and Lawless Violence”, and the older man told Saviano that he should, 
in time, leave his velvet prison in spite of the risks or, he said: 
“Your enemies will have achieved their aim. Their aim is to have you 
dead. And you will be dead – not physically but mentally and morally. 
You cannot do as you wish; you cannot live fully. They have killed 
you.” Recalling this Saviano says: “This was a revelation for me then: 
he was right, and I’ve learned he was right.”
Like Rushdie, who now lives relatively openly, and the Somalian-born 
writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who still lives with security after 
anti-Islamic “blasphemies” in her 2006 memoir, Infidel, and her strong 
anti-Islamist campaigning, Saviano continues to rub salt in the wounds 
of his enemies by his insistent, personal force. And like them, he also 
suffers not just from the malice of those who work or fall into step 
with the mud machine, but also from the faintheartedness of those who 
wish him well. He talks of safe houses that had to be abandoned because 
of the protests of frightened neighbours (as well as the courage of 
anonymous friends and even strangers who extended hospitality); and he 
says he has enemies on the left as well as the right, who regard his 
anti-Mafia writings and campaigns as “excessive”, even antipatriotic.
On the day we meet, those parts of the main Italian newspapers that are 
not exercised by Saviano and his TV show are signalling the crisis of 
the Berlusconi government – provoked, as in the past, by scandals with 
young women to whom the prime minister has allegedly offered 
hospitality and “protection”. More seriously for him, this is now 
accompanied by a falling public trust on the part of citizens who 
appear to no longer believe in his ability to bring success to the 
economy. “Berlusconi is finished,” says Saviano flatly.
In the first episode of Vieni Via Con Me, the famous comic Roberto 
Benigni tells a Mafia joke against the prime minister: mocking a 
Berlusconi hint that the rumours about his private life were an 
indication that the Mafia were plotting against him, Benigni asked if 
the Mafia were now using pretty young girls instead of guns and bombs, 
and imagined the premier returning home one night to find three girls 
in his bed, and shrieking: “The Mafia are after me!”.
For Saviano, the programme, mixing solemnity and mockery and attracting 
record audiences, is an overdue sign of a civic revolt. But his eyes 
remain downcast; and he must move on, to rehearsals for the next show. 
At once a hero of his time and a victim of his country, he smiles, 
shakes hands, leaves our luxurious cell, and the escorts close about 
him.
‘Beauty and the Inferno’ by Roberto Saviano (MacLehose Press) will be 
published in the UK early next year
John Lloyd is an FT contributing editor
..................................................
Menu
Address withheld
Risotto with shrimps
Sea bass, vegetables and steamed potatoes
Fiano di Avellino wine
Coffee
Total (including service) Withheld
..................................................
The TV show that shocked Italy
In a land ruled by television, the success of Vieni Via Con Me (Come 
Away With Me) is a major event. The sociologist Ilvo Diamanti sees it 
as a new way of doing television, appealing to the mind rather than the 
gut; the criminologist Federico Varese applauds its ability to showcase 
Roberto Saviano, making an anti-Mafia stance “cool” with the young.
Roberto Saviano on ‘Vieni Via Con Me’
Its success is phenomenal: on RAI 3 (the third channel of the state 
broadcaster), a show with 2m viewers is a success: Vieni Via ... 
started with nearly 8m on November 8, had grown to 10m by its third 
episode last Monday and is expected to be bigger still for its last 
scheduled transmission this week.
The programme was instantly on contested ground – first of all, within 
RAI itself, where the director-general Mauro Masi objected to its 
choice of guests being consistently opposed to prime minister Silvio 
Berlusconi (they were). He asked for balance but did not, or could not, 
ban it.
In the first episode the famous comic Roberto Benigni (of La Vita e 
Bella) gave a long anti-Berlusconi monologue and cried: “Don’t resign, 
Silvio, don’t listen to [Gianfranco] Fini [once a Berlusconi ally, now 
his opponent], otherwise you’ll be ruined, you’ll never work again; and 
Santoro, Fazio, L’Unita, Repubblica [the commentators and papers 
opposed to him] will never work again ... ”
Saviano argued, also in a monologue, that the tactic of personal 
defamation now practised in a state where media and politics have 
merged has “put democracy in danger, literally at risk. And one is in 
danger insofar as if you oppose certain powers, or this government, 
then what awaits you is an attack from the mud machine, which takes off 
from tiny facts of your private life”. He cited the publicising of 
politicians and journalists’ homosexuality “as if that was a crime; 
it’s unthinkable, incredible”.
He stirred up further controversy by saying that organised crime, 
especially the Calabrian Mafia, the ’Ndrangheta, had penetrated 
business and politics in the north. The interior minister Roberto 
Maroni, himself a member of the Northern League, was furious, the more 
so since he claims success, which Saviano concedes is partly real, in 
combating the Mafia. Maroni, who was a guest in the third episode, said 
Saviano was plain wrong, then, confronted with the writer’s insistence 
that his facts were right, backed down, even adding that he would like 
to work with Saviano in the future.
The show’s importance lies less in its content than in its sudden 
popularity. Much of the critique of Berlusconi and his government and 
of the spread of organised crime, has been going on for years. But 
Saviano, with co-host Fabio Fazio, has struck a chord at the right 
time: when the apparently unassailable prime minister looks weak, 
Italians are disillusioned with a government that promised much more 
than it has delivered, and the weight of the pro-Berlusconi media is 
being questioned as never before and the young – who make up a 
disproportionately large part of the programme’s audience – are 
entering the political arena.
It is too early to write of Berlusconi that he who lives by television 
may die from it: but it may be true soon.
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