Cover

Roberto Saviano

MY ITALIANS

True Stories of Crime and Courage

Translated by Anne Milano Appel

Roberto Saviano

MY ITALIANS

True Stories of Crime and Courage

Translated by Anne Milano Appel

PENGUIN BOOKS

MY ITALIANS

Roberto Saviano was born in Naples in 1979. He is the author of the international bestseller Gomorrah, the film adaptation of which won the Grand Prix of the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, and Zero Zero Zero. He has been living under police protection since October 2006, following threats received from the criminal organizations that he denounced. In November 2008 Saviano was invited by the Nobel Committee in Stockholm to give a lecture on ‘Freedom of Speech and Lawless Violence’.

Preface

For a writer there is something unreal about working on a television show and putting it together from start to finish. On the page, everything you write leaves room for imagination; everything you recount can be experienced, pondered and elaborated upon in the reader’s mind and soul. With television that’s not the case: with television the words are not written down – you have to visualize the words. A narrative is most effective when you don’t try to faithfully reproduce life, but instead transform it truthfully into a story. In essence if you’re a writer you feel out of place everywhere but on the page, and yet when I was invited to tell stories about Italy on television, my answer was instinctively ‘yes’. I was excited about it, but I could only nod my head briefly, as if it were my body saying ‘yes’ rather than my brain.

And so an adventure began, made up of tension, sorrow and intense passion, an adventure that made me giddy and afforded me a chance to glimpse a way out of the dark night. The night of my country. I was dreaming of an ambitious, quality programme, with prominent guests: a show intended for a wide audience, that would portray an Italy rarely shown on TV. I wanted to talk about the mudslinging machine, the systematic process of discrediting people who speak out, about the mafia and politics, about how vote-buying works, about the lies surrounding the earthquake of L’Aquila, about the waste-disposal business. My dream (or ambition) was to speak to that segment of the country that is actually the largest, the part that wants to redesign the nation and rebuild it, that wants to declare that all Italians are not the same and that our diversity lies in being able to make mistakes without being corrupt, in having weaknesses that do not involve blackmail and extortion. I wanted to speak to that portion of the population that dreams, unashamedly, of being able to call this land of ours, which today is so forlorn, their country, patria, once again.