The City of the Living: A portrait of Rome’s ‘psychic’ violence, social problems and outcasts

“Horror on the outskirts of Rome. A 23-year-old boy was killed in an apartment in Collatino after being tortured for hours. The crime has no apparent motive.” – La Repubblica, March 6th, 2016

So begins The City of the Living, the latest work from multi-award-winning Italian writer Nicola Lagioia. Unlike his previous books, however, this is a work of non-fiction, a descent into the darkest corners of Rome, a city that Lagioia claims is violent “on the psychic level”.

The killing of Luca Varani by 29-year-old Manuel Foffo and 30-year-old Marco Prato takes place on March 5th, 2016. After three drug- and alcohol-fuelled days, the two invite Luca Varani to Foffo’s apartment where they drug him and torture him to death. When questioned, the two claimed that they wanted to see what committing such an act “felt like”.

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The case excites intense public interest. Sensational reporting follows, feeding readers’ morbid curiosity. Comments on social media are frequently ill-informed and mostly toxic. People with the most tenuous connections to Varani or his two murderers become celebrities overnight.

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With resonances of Mark O’Connell’s recent A Thread of Violence, this new work explores the apparently motiveless crime that Lagioia sees as a metaphor for modern Rome. “It seemed that all the despair, bitterness, arrogance, brutality, sense of failure that filled the city were concentrated in a single point.”

Lagioia becomes obsessed with the case. It reminds him of a particular event in his own past, something that he had aways avoided thinking about. Now, he is forced to confront it, to question it in a way he couldn’t have at the time.

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The book highlights the unremarkable nature of the two young men who decide to commit this crime together. They were ordinary; from ordinary families; leading ordinary lives. They were not monsters: but they were capable of monstrous deeds. Lagioia questions the origin of evil: an evil that in their case clothed itself in the ordinary.

The City of the Living is also a portrait of Rome; of its economic divide, its social problems, its social outcasts.

Lagioia paints a grim but compelling picture.