The history of Italy is also criminal history

Black stories of the history of Italy from the birth of the nation to the present day: here is the focus of " Italian Blood " (Neri Pozza editore, 2024, pp. 320, also e-book), essay by the journalist Roberto Casalini , born in Cagliari and Sassari by adoption.

A volume outside the box because it tells of bloody and bloody events, bringing even the apparently most "private" crimes back to the spirit of the times.

Thus emerges what Casalini defines as «the heart of darkness of the "Italian character", if the Italian character exists: the primordial brutality that also resurfaces in advanced modernity».

Crimes of passion and family, crimes of greed and revenge, outlaws from Musolino to Riina, mafias, political assassinations, mysteries and massacres, murders that are still remembered and those that were famous in their time: from Countess Lara killed by her young lover and kept at Murri case which shocked Bologna; from Countess Tarnowska, dark Russian lady in Venice, to Gino Girolimoni, false monster of Rome invented by fascism; from Leonarda Cianciulli, the soap maker from Correggio, to the "beast of San Gregorio" Rina Fort.

And then the crime of bitter, that of Curare and that of vitriol, the Mantis of Cairo Montenotte and the Circe of Versilia, the false blonde of the red spider, the model who kills the playboy and the canaro who tears his persecutor to pieces. Between children who kill their parents and adults who kill the fledglings, the disturbing stories of serial murderers. And, alongside crime cases, the stories of an Italy that has the most aggressive and pervasive organized crime in Europe, as well as legendary gangs and bandits, from Musolino to Mesina, from the Marseillesi clan to the Magliana gang.

The political struggle in Italy was also a ferocious affair with many casualties, from Cavallotti to Umberto I, from Matteotti to the Rosselli brothers, up to Aldo Moro and Mino Pecorelli. And the vulnerability of democracy is constant in Italy, periodically exposed to authoritarian temptations and coups from above.

In short, a mixture of explosive violence that leads us to ask Roberto Casalini what was the driving force that led him to a book on a topic so complex as to deal with the pervasiveness of crime in Italian society?

«I started from the crime news. But the crimes, detached from the larger story, risked being just horror stories - the Bergamo vampire, Correggio's soap-making machine - or detective stories whose endings had to be rewritten, and I wasn't fascinated by the eternal quarrel between the guilty and the innocent who accompanies many cases. I felt the need to put the murders in context. So I retraced the history of Italy from the Unification to today, to find a correlative to private violence in public violence."

What do you mean when you talk in the book about the heart of darkness of the Italian character?

«We often described ourselves as 'good Italians'. But alongside a generous and supportive Italy, there exists and has existed a ferocious Italy, dedicated to destroying and hiding the dust under the carpet. The war against brigandage and banditry speaks of rounded-up countries, of populations persecuted en bloc, of massacres. A book published in 1900 by a Tuscan soldier, Giulio Bechi, active in Sardinia against bandits, is not surprisingly titled Big Hunt. The bandits like wild boars, like mouflons. In Italy the army has long had a free hand, with states of siege. And he was the author of brutal episodes, in the colonial wars and in the Second World War. Our country has known a dictatorship and long periods of more than heated clashes and civil wars. Even the crimes of ordinary people have been affected by this inflamed climate, often carrying an excess of violence."

How important was what you defined as "almost autistic individualism" in Italian violence?

«An authoritarian society can also make citizens march in a parade, but it does not develop citizenship, it does not educate people to feel part of a community. Italian society has experienced widespread anti-statism. In the nineteenth century the enemy was the tax collector state that imposed the tax on bread, the state that imposed compulsory military service. A distant state leads one to turn inward, to think: I make the law and justice myself."

Are we still a society of amoral familism as an ancient survey said?

«The concept of amoral familism, developed in 1958 by the American sociologist Edward C. Banfield in a survey of Southern Italy, has been much contested. It has been said that zones of amoral familism exist all over the world, which is not our characteristic. But it is certain that privileging the family against and above the laws has had an impact on our criminal history. The crimes were most often covered up, hidden by the circle of murderers. Only in a few cases that I document - Murri in 1902, Picchioni in 1946, Nigrisoli in 1963 - did the reports of the culprits come from family members".

What role has public violence played in our country?

«That of generating instability, fear and distrust. At cyclical intervals, say every twenty thirty years, the institutional structure has been questioned from above and below. From above with coups, successful or attempted coups, with massacres. From below with street protests and peasant jacquerie, desires for revolution, terrorism. It's as if our democracy periodically doubts itself."

Why does he end his book with a chapter entitled the age of anxiety?

«Because so few people have ever been killed in Italy - since the end of the 1990s, homicides have dropped by 75% - and at the same time the insecurity and the demand for protection have never been so high. Perhaps it has to do with a distressing global context of wars, pandemics, economic and climate crises. It certainly has something to do with the fact that today's crimes - the loving mother who kills her child, the adolescents raised in comfort who exterminate their parents, the many feminicides - give the idea that the murderer is next door, while Once upon a time, crime was or was perceived as distant from us."