La città dei vivi
What is the face of Evil, at the beginning of the twenty-first century? In March 2016, in a nondescript apartment on the outskirts of Rome, two young men from good families, named Manuel Foffo and Marco Prato, torture a younger boy, Luca Varani—without any real motive—inflicting upon him a slow and terrible death. The case immediately riveted the attention of the mass media and profoundly troubled public opinion. Soon, it emerged that the killers had been leading secret lives, very different from everything their friends and parents thought they knew about them. And even though the relationship between them and their victim also soon became a topic of discussion, it was the nature of the murder that prompted the most disturbing questions. Was this a terrible case of gratuitous violence? Were the murderers sadists? Lunatics? Did they really understand what they were doing? Some even began to describe the murder as a case of satanic possession.
Nicola Lagioia engages us emotionally with this case from the very outset: he attends Varani’s funeral, meets the boy’s parents, collects documents, interviews the chief figures involved in the murder, and carries on a lengthy correspondence with one of the killers. For him, setting out on the trail of the killing also means descending into the night of Rome, a city that has become unlivable and yet teems with life, besieged by rats and wild animals, overwhelmed by corruption and investigations, riven with narcotics and juvenile prostitution, and yet capable of giving the people who live there a sense of freedom unrivaled by any other place on earth. A city that, at the time of this story, had no mayor, but two popes. Lagioia’s trek brings out the dark side of the times we live in, at once made up of expectations betrayed, difficulties in becoming adults, inequalities, gaps in identity, alienation, and bewilderment. Once again, Nicola Lagioia appears in our bookstores with a fascinating investigation into the deepest roots of Evil, asking the most upsetting question of them all: what secrets can lurk behind the everyday lives of people who are close to us, people we love?
Nicola Lagioia was born in Bari in 1973 and lives in Rome. He has published Tre sistemi per sbarazzarsi di Tolstoj (senza risparmiare se stessi) (Lo Straniero Prize), Occidente per principianti, Riportando tutto a casa (Vittorini Prize, Volponi Prize, Viareggio Prize), La Ferocia (Strega Prize, Mondello Prize). Lagioia writes for “Repubblica,” “Il Venerdì,” “Internazionale,” and “La Stampa.” His books have been translated into 15 languages.
