The City of the Living

In Elena Ferrante’s Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey (2015), fellow Italian writer Nicola Lagioia was afforded the opportunity to pose a number of questions, via e-mail, to the inimitable author. This also coincided with the year they were both finalists for the Strega Award (Lagioia eventually won for his first novel in translation, Ferocity). It’s a fascinating repartee and at one point, he states “For me literary needs always take precedence over the journalistic ones.” This is certainly evident in his latest book – a book which states it’s a work of fiction on the verso of the title page but then acknowledges that “the story told in this book is true” AKA “the most vicious crime in modern Roman history”.

In March 2016 in an apartment just outside Rome, the body of twenty-three-year-old Luca Varani was discovered brutally murdered at the hands of Manuel Foffo and Marco Prato. Two seemingly ‘ordinary’ men from ‘decent’ backgrounds. The crime supposedly sent Italy into shockwaves at the time but managed to bypass the UK entirely. The first I heard of it was when I started Nicola Lagioia’s The City of the Living, published by Europa editions UK and translated by Ann Goldstein (Queen of Italian translation and brilliant friend of Ferrante).

This gripping literary work of true crime pulls together months of interviews, courts documentation and correspondence with one of the killers in such a way, it reads like fiction. While the crime itself is stomach-churning and the conclusion of the court-case infuriating, Lagioia never loses empathy in portraying every injured party of this tragedy (and there are many). He seeks to expose Foffo and Prato’s humanity even when actions proved they had, frighteningly, lost it. Painting a truly compelling narrative of class, corruption, drugs and violence, he forefronts class, betrayed expectations, sexual confusion, and the provocative blood ties often unbearable in families.

Lagioia describes The Eternal City as one of absolute freedom but this story shows just how oppressive that liberty can be. The author, who lived in Rome for many years before moving on, pulls no punches in depicting the decay of a city crumbling, not only via its historic ruins but from its rotten core. A metropolis of darkness and an underbelly most tourists are unaware of. So convincing is his prose that it soured my opinion of a place I once adored.

A lot of its publicity has compared The City of the Living to Capote’s In Cold Blood, however, I find it pointless to compare the two. Both are incredible pieces of writing but this, is less dated, more incisive and one tends not to question its veracity (Dave Cullen’s Columbine or Michelle McNamara’s I’ll be Gone in the Dark are probably more appropriate contemporaries). After reluctantly finishing it, the first thing I did was Google the case. I was furious to not only finish the book but also in such a way, where justice failed (yet again!). I had to, if only to see these people whose lives and death(s) had kept me so rapt over three days because at no point does the author give any description of the three men beyond the height of one and the hairpiece of the other.

The City of the Living is a brilliant and disturbing page-turner brimming with tension. The book is a must-read about the reverberation and ruination of lives following a brutal act, in which identity crises, sexual complexities, personal supposition, and the location it all happened in played a part. It bolsters the notion that once again, humans can be atrocious and the belief in/notion of justice is not only blind but, at times, ridiculous.