Roberto Saviano
Gomorra

"I know. But I have no proof. I don't even have clues". _{(Pier Paolo Pasolini, November 14, 1974)}

"I know and I have proof". _{(Roberto Saviano, 2006)}

When Pasolini wrote his "Romanzo delle Stragi", an indictment from the Corriere della Sera against the political intelligentsia accused of covering up the truth about the tragic events in Italy during the 60s and 70s, and at the same time a passionate claim of the role of the intellectual as a free spirit within society, unbound by the need for proof and therefore closer to the truth, Roberto Saviano had not yet been born.

Thirty-two years later, Saviano is twenty-seven years old, but he is not an intellectual, not an established and recognized thinker, he is simply a young and angry Neapolitan journalist, and he writes "Gomorrah".

But what is Gomorrah? By the author's own admission, Gomorrah is the modern-day "I know", an instinctive, visceral "I know" that is both accurate and documented concerning the evils afflicting Naples and all of Campania. Beyond the rhetoric of "Bella Napulè", beyond every cheap rhetoric, beyond pizza, mandolin, and buffalo mozzarella, Saviano guides us with his disillusioned, angry, never-tamed gaze on a hellish journey through today's Gomorrah, a land where evil does not come from "fire and brimstone", but from drugs and cement. Gomorrah is the land "with more murdered people in Europe", the territory "where ferocity is tied to business, where nothing has value unless it generates power".

The Camorra, or rather "The System", as it is commonly defined by its affiliates, controls everything in the Neapolitan area. Divided into clans, families that are nothing more than ferocious and bloodthirsty business organizations, it has a grip on every activity, legal and illegal. Trade, drug dealing, import-export of every merchandise, counterfeiting of fashion products, production of the same, extortion, construction entrepreneurship, waste disposal... There is no activity over which the system does not extend its claws. The System is a company, and simultaneously something more. It is a capillary organization that provides social assistance to its affiliates and their families, which, without wishing for a different state from the current one—and whose laws it continuously violates, as stated by a pentito (informant) quoted by Saviano—insinuates itself into the lax meshes of the Italian state, substituting it.

Fierce, ruthless men, without scruples, intoxicated by delusions of omnipotence and lust for power, hidden behind brutal and disconcerting nicknames ("Sandokan", "Ciruzzo 'o Milionario", "Cicciotto 'e Mezzanotte", "'O Lupo"...), move the pieces of a war that since 1979, the year Saviano was born, has left almost four thousand murdered bodies in its wake.

Roberto Saviano tells us all this, but he does not limit himself to giving us circumstantial, objective evidence, judicial acts, and procedural documents, he gives us something more, something rarer, authentic, and profound. He gives us himself. Because Roberto Saviano is not a champion of justice, not a hero, or at least he did not want to be one, he is simply a profoundly indignant, suffering, and curious young man. Yes, curious, hungry for truth, eager to find by himself the answers to the question that all young people in his condition ask: why does a young person born in Campania not have the same rights, the same consideration he would have if he were born in any other area of Europe or Italy?

What has poisoned the heart of his land, even more than the thousands of tons of toxic waste buried in it?

The answer that seems to emerge from the pages of Gomorrah is: hunger. The hunger for success, power, the reckless and insane lust for dominance of a few, dragging with them many, clash, destroy each other, and together crush every component, even the most unrelated and neutral to them, of society. This is Gomorrah, a "journey into the economic empire and into the dream of the Camorra's dominion", a report conducted with the tools of authentic journalism, the kind done in the field, and at the same time with the soul, with the passion of a young man who, alone and primarily for himself, immerses in the rot of life, between landfills and bloodbaths, to finally reemerge exhausted, destroyed, but conscious. Conscious of reality, of the criminal hyperuranium that moves everything in the land of the Camorra, of the blood and money that are the primary constituents of every stone, of every wall around him; conscious of the facts, of the motivations, of the people and their thoughts.

Pasolini knew because he imagined, and the imagination of a cultured, informed man, of vivid intelligence and ready ability to establish connections, never strays far from the truth. Pasolini knew because he was a novelist, he was able to write a novel about the truth. Saviano knows because he has seen. More powerful, incisive, caustic and burning than well-placed speculation, there is only the dazzling clarity of truth that passes through one's own eyes. Autopsis. Saviano has completed his hellish journey, has emerged dirty, smelly, sweaty, and shocked from it, he has not come out "to see the stars again" but has escaped by swimming from his private cayenne, shared with thousands of his peers without a future, a modern-day Papillon, by his own admission, clinging to a piece of wreckage, but able to shout: "damn bastards, I'm still alive!".

Saviano knows, he wanted to know to continue to feel alive, truly a man, not a dead servant of the system, which strikes even those who are unrelated to it. Raised in the land of the Camorra, among the murdered dead and waste, among friends and acquaintances colluded with the system in various ways and happy to be so, where a father reminds you that even if you have a degree, without a gun you are nobody, through the strength of his will Saviano has survived to send us his testimony, to share with us his most intimate thoughts.

And now, "We Know".