The night, my personal night, began on January 31, 2005. It was on that night that three young men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty were murdered right in front of the school where I worked as a teacher in Casavatore, in the province of Naples. I can still summon up a number of pictures in my mind that concern both the murders themselves and my own direct involvement. Concerning the event, one need only review the newspaper accounts from that time to get a clear idea of three aspects that caught my attention immediately. First of all, of course, the savagery of the crime. Three young men: not crime bosses, not leaders, not criminals in charge of narcotics marketplaces. No, nothing more than simple foot soldiers. Perhaps not even that. Murdered in an especially brutal fashion: they’d been captured, each handcuffed to the other, led to the gate in front of the school, ordered to kneel, and then shot to death, each with a bullet to the head. Then there was another element: the level of organization. The death squad that carried out the massacre was ready for anything that might crop up. They enjoyed uncontested control of the territory, where they could move freely, practically undisturbed, whatever they might choose to do. Disciplined in their dispensation of violence. And cunning. Tactically clever. Professional killers who operated in disguise, dressed as carabinieri, meaning policemen … and in those uniforms, they’d had absolutely no difficulty detaining the three young men. Stopping them and handcuffing them. And then leading them off to the slaughter.
Last, the third point, perhaps the most horrifying of them all. The murderers had operated with virtually complete impunity. It was as if the dead men had been submerged in a bottomless pool of silence even before they were killed. In a pool of silence: apartment buildings, televisions playing—themselves a form of silence—bowls of pasta set out for the evening meal. Hush, every one, those corpses seemed to whisper. A single order was issued … and everyone fell silent. Except for a young girl who—a few days later, or perhaps it was a few months—wrote a short essay, a very short, unassuming essay, that told the story—with just enough detail—of exactly what she and her family and her neighbors had glimpsed that evening from the windows of their homes overlooking the school. The cars coming to a halt, the men getting out, the handcuffed victims shouting, shoving, realizing it was all over, and begging for mercy. The gunshots. The cars driving away.
That is all that need be said about the three crucial acts that characterized the core elements of this slaughter. To that I must add my own personal involvement. Because two things happened that surface frequently in my mind and that I’ve told others about perhaps ten thousand times, in all sorts of different settings, places, locales, and contexts. First of all: the principal of the school, the educational director, decided that it would be important to send a clear signal immediately after the murders. She said so clearly, as was her wont: an institutional signal. A signal that would cause a loud noise in the midst of all that nothingness, all that silence. She started talking about town council sessions to be held right there, outside the gates of that school. That school, on the outskirts of the outskirts of Naples. A message about calling radio stations, newspapers, television news crews. Demonstrations that could serve to involve the city’s civil society, trade unions, political alliances. And even—why not?—local intellectuals... She never tired of saying that those three deaths were a burden, something significant, even though the gang war now raging between the Di Lauro clan and the breakaway renegades had by then resulted in many, many deaths indeed. But after the initial uproar and the first excellent resolutions, that woman, who was powerfully committed to her civil engagement, began to see herself and her school as increasingly lonely and abandoned. No one seemed to care anymore about those three dead men. Dragged down into the riptide of the vast number of other dead men—dead bodies that meanwhile continued to drop to the pavement.
And so we did what we thought most needed doing: we went together, she and I, right to the office of the regional government’s commissioner for social policy, to explain to her that however you looked at it, three dead men are nothing to overlook—they weren’t just some overwhelming, inconvenient burden, pressing on the gates of a public school. It had been no easy matter to arrange for that meeting. We had to reach out to friends, rely on a network of personal contacts. That was our only hope for wangling an audience, even at such a tragic juncture, when you would normally have expected all doors to swing open to us, wide open. Already, this was an unsettling indicator... But in the fullness of time, the commissioner welcomed us into her office. For ten minutes. She spent more time glancing at her watch than listening to us, however. We didn’t know exactly what to do, and my colleague, the principal, had no choice but to talk excruciatingly quickly. Like a machine-gun burst: five intense minutes in which she spewed out thousands of words. Each slamming into the next. Perfect those words were, though, in their specific content of anguished grief. Still, they counted for little if anything. At last, the meeting came to an end. We were entrusted to a secretary who promised us a future agenda abounding with initiatives, interventions, alliances, decisive actions, and official measures. But it was all smoke and mirrors. A soap bubble. We never heard another word from either the commissioner or her secretary.
The second thing I can’t help but remember, even now, is something far more subtle, because it had nothing to do with the central focus of political initiative, but instead my everyday life. The surrounding territory, the school. I can’t say now whether this happened a few days after our meeting with the commissioner or practically simultaneously with it, perhaps even the very same day—but I am quite sure, and I insist on pointing this out: there was absolutely no connection between the two things. It happened in the afternoon. At school. During my working day. At around six p.m. There were still people in the classrooms, lessons were still underway. There were other people outside, awaiting their turn. In all, roughly a hundred people, students, teachers, and support staff. Suddenly a carabinieri squad car arrived, pulling right in—through that same cursed gate. An officer got out. I couldn’t say whether he was a marshal, a brigadier, or a captain. But I remember exactly what he proceeded to do: he immediately asked who was in charge of that school. I was there and I replied that it was me, that I was in charge of that school. So then he looked at me, and just like in a movie, he flashed his badge. And then he started talking. He was really a very nice man. And he carefully weighed his words, words that must have carried a certain burden for him, as well as for us. He told me not to worry. But that this was a critical moment. That what had happened was truly something out of the ordinary, and that extraordinary measures would therefore need to be taken. And therefore, since not even they, the authorities, were capable of maintaining control of the territory on their own—the surrounding buildings, the town as a whole—it was going to be necessary to shutter our school. I remember how, in my astonishment, I took off my glasses, something I do only when there’s some great pressure inside my head. I told him that was out of the question. Not even if the mayor of Casavatore ordered it. Or the superintendent of schools. Or the president of the regional government … the carabiniere immediately dismissed my objections. And still just as courteous as ever, he carefully doled out the following words.
Verbatim: “Sir, you really don’t get it. You and your school are not a normal thing. You constitute a soft target.” So that’s what we’d become, a soft target, a game piece in that exceedingly strange round of Monopoly where, on the playing board of gang interests, the presence of a living location, a shred of social existence, could actually do serious harm to their business, even just to their desire for control based on a foundation of silence. And so we shut the school. Not for good. But shut the school we did.
A few months later, I left that school and began another life, another profession. A very different one. A privileged one. A more fortunate path. A career as a historian. Still, that January 31—and the moments that immediately followed it—stayed with me. Powerfully. And they began to ferment and agitate within me. For years already, I had been deeply interested in the medieval history of Naples. And I found myself wondering, urgently: What is the source of all this savagery? Is the energy that people devote with such determination to violence solely the product of choices guided by economic factors? Is it merely the progeny of an urban fabric that crumbles and disintegrates, thereby creating stagnant pools of corruption and crime that gradually grow and expand, creeping like a weed up the trunk of a healthy tree? And is the clear separation between my world—a world of solid institutions, civil coexistence, social cooperation—and their world nothing more than a matter of sociology, bound up with immediate factors, their here and now, this diseased everyday existence of ours, where the urban outskirts become clogged, creating a social desert? Or is it something else? Something deeper, so deep-rooted that it has carved its way into the viscera of time, allowing the weed of corruption to grow and germinate?
That’s what I wondered. Until, in the months that followed that night, I was reminded of an episode I had read about a few years previously. An age-old episode, perhaps too old, and which at first glance had nothing in common with that horrifying event of 2005. Something that had happened in 1343. A story of violence, hunger, and criminal clans. An entirely Neapolitan story. I know that trying to put together episodes so distant—in terms of era and setting—can be dangerous. That’s not how history is measured out, and I’m fully aware of the fact. All the same, this event from 1343 struck me—and strikes me still—because to me it seems emblematic of something that can help us to progress a certain distance beyond the customary view of the phenomenon of Neapolitan criminality. It’s a fragment that I’d like to think may allow us to extend that vision, enlarging it, expanding it, and in a certain sense completing it. With the working hypothesis (contrived, one may very justifiably say, but still, I think, absolutely legitimate from the historian’s point of view) that there is, perhaps, something linking the two episodes—a nexus—the episode from 1343, which we shall explore, and the episode from 2005 I have just recounted. A bond that links them together. A thread that we may call—to use the terminology proper to those whose profession is historiography—a struttura di lungo periodo, a long-period structure, or to hearken back to the Annales school, a structure of the longue durée. A structure that can be sliced thinner and thinner until it becomes as minuscule and imperceptible as a filament, or else takes on ever-larger dimensions and physiognomies until it resembles a six-lane highway, but which preserves one overriding characteristic: that it is a constant. A constant that abides in its substantial features even when its impact wanes, because those features persist. Something that is not limited to the realm of the economy or the sociological or the anthropological, but which is instead deeply rooted in the memory, impressed there faithfully, like a groove in a vinyl record, in the fundamentals of life in a city like Naples. An indestructible seed, made up of time, duration, stability, codes, traditions, prejudices, and norms that has taken root deeply—over the course of the past seven centuries—and with little if any variation.
***
This is how it went: shadows flitted around the ship. They arrived in silence, without even the slightest sound. The men standing guard only noticed them when it was already too late. In the blink of an eye, they found themselves bound and gagged. In the meantime, however, the other members of the crew had woken up. They sounded the alarm. The captain arrived. A brawl broke out. Furious, but soon over. Just one death. The captain: his throat slit. His head practically dangling, so powerful had the blow been. A clean cut. Lying on the ground was the one victim of this night’s violence...
Or else...
This is how it went: the boats approached. There was no resistance. The only one to get upset was him: the captain. He shouted and he inveighed. He was determined to be left alone. He didn’t like having all those hands on him. Those hands, gripping him, restraining him, dragging and hurting him. He loudly proclaimed that he was from Genoa. And that his masters would make them regret their actions. He refused to surrender his cargo. He insulted the boarding crew. He spat. And eventually his men, too, began to be inflamed by his example. The chief of the Neapolitans, or the elder, or the one who was sick and tired of the noise, or just the single most reckless member of the boarding party, ran out of patience and simply cut the captain’s head off, at a single, sharp blow. The situation calmed down. At last, there was silence. And on the deck lay the one victim of this night’s violence...
Or else...
You can let your imagination run where it will. The same is true of the written word. Reconstructing this history of November 1343 to suit ourselves, moving tiles and adding details to the small canvas that lies at the basis of this account. Still, however you turn it, whatever angle you look at it, one detail is incontrovertible: in the end, a man is going to be killed. And we know virtually nothing about him. Nothing except for the fact that he’s Genoese, and that by trade he is a sea captain, and he sails the seas. From one end of the Mediterranean to another, like so many others who came before him and after him. A man who fell victim, but all the same, a little bit of a killer himself. For a split second, he is one. But why? Because he belongs to an aggressive approach to economics, something that had sprung up in the previous two centuries, and which completely modified the way people understood and practiced trade. A way that, perhaps, we can define as capitalistic. An approach that links the path of his city, Genoa, to that of his city’s sister cities upon the water, both of them with different histories and identities, Pisa and Venice, two cities that over the course of the Middle Ages spent more time at war, fighting to claim supremacy over the Mediterranean, than they did simply living in peace with each other. And that links them to the other great center of economic development, a city that had no port but whose ideas spanned and crossed any sea or other geographic border: ideas made of paper, techniques, and numbers. A city that was the fifth element of the world, Florence.
If we want to be romantic, I could say that with this one shameful act, with this murder, the miles of the clan not only murdered a single man but also the vision that he embodied, which had progressed so notably in the Kingdom, to the point of virtually monopolizing its economy. An idea that revolutionized the existing structures, the city’s state of equilibrium, modifying them to their very roots, in an unbalanced relationship between North and South. How that happened can be glimpsed, in transparency, in this chapter, where, however, my chief interest is to examine Naples and its society from another point of view: that of its commercial life and the relations between that life and the world of international capital, of which in some small way the Genoese captain is also an expression. The man who was, at the same time, both victim and, in spite of himself—the last thing he would ever have been able to imagine—executioner.
Let’s go back to him now, on the ship’s deck. His throat just cut, his head practically severed. It’s a snapshot: him, lying sprawled on the wooden deck. And the miles who’s just overpowered him. He’s standing above him, looking down. They’re united together: murderer and victim. Two men. Two horizons of sensibility. Let’s focus upon them for a moment. The executioner is the Neapolitan miles. How do we imagine him? Sneering and arrogant. Violent. Insolent. Sheathed in a diving bell made up of prejudices, rituals, and mental and psychological training that make him what he is: a prominent member of an elite that right here and right now confidently dictates terms throughout this city, with his clan and with the men of the seggi to which he belongs, every bit as powerful as the queen, if not more so. Capable of making decisions like the one he just took upon himself, uncertain as to what aftermath it may bring upon him, because attacking a foreign ship is an illegal act. An act of piracy. Obviously, the punishments can be quite severe. But he is indifferent to that, and to make that clear, he uses no words. He places forefinger and middle finger together, like a gun, and flicks them carelessly under his chin.123 It’s an age-old Italian gesture indicating scorn, indifference. He can afford that figurative shrug. He feels special, above the law. In Naples now we’d call him a mammasantissima. A man of utter power: he knows he has it and he knows how to use it. And a man of tradition: which runs in his veins like a surge of honor, loyalty, and might, with an unquestioned charisma and influence over his men, his quarter of the city, and in the mental conception he has developed of himself.
On the other hand, we have the victim. A man of the sea. Genoese. He comes from a city that has necessarily been forced over time to reach out and live its life on the salt water. Nature imposed that choice on the city. A harsh topography whose steep slopes left nothing but a narrow strip of land to cultivate. Devoid of any potential, devoid of all resources. So what remains is the sea. The instrument of a civilization that had been waiting for nothing so much as to plunge out into those waters. Because that was where the future lay. That is where potential could be found, with a chance to redraw the borders, which consisted entirely of sky, water, and mountains.
***
And so, on that night in 1343, two different horizons were facing off. Two different ways of understanding life and the world. Each of the two characters who incarnated them—the victim and his executioner—felt they were at the center of their own community, which they directed and ruled. With a very similar idea, in many ways, of what the hierarchy was, bound up with family and the clan they belonged to, where violence was understood as a tool for the resolution of disagreements. Men who, however, in this specific context, found themselves at odds, caught in a mortal game that culminated in a brutal murder.
Excerpted from Naples 1343 by Amedeo Feniello and translated by Antony Shugaar, published by Other Press on November 26, 2024. Copyright © Amedeo Feniello and translated by Antony Shugaar. Reprinted by permission of Other Press.
