Heaven and Hell in Campania

Monday 28th July 2014

The Camorra long ago lost interest in the cigarette trade and even drugs can now be sub-contracted. Now they control the port of Naples and the real money is in fake fashion, toxic waste disposal and construction. According to Saviano, by far the greatest harm the Camorra do is in the cheap-rate dumping of toxic substances from all over Europe onto sites in Campania, with disastrous effects on health in many poorer areas. He lists a whole host of terrorist organisations, including ETA, the IRA and the Red Brigades, whose direct murder victims added up do not come close to those of the Camorra; this does not, of course, include the collateral damage of toxic waste.

The murder figures are shocking. Campania has the highest murder rate in Italy — just under 50 people per million per annum — about the same as the US, four times that of the United kingdom, five times that of Italy as a whole. Looking at these figures its as if nearly all the murders in Campania are Camorra-related. Some speculate that that the clans also kill a number of Chinese labourers they have imported and African pedlars they have sub-contracted, which don't appear in any statistics. Indeed, there is a disturbing episode at the beginning of Gomorrah: when a container is opened and Chinese bodies spill out. There is a very visible presence of South Asians in Naples, not mentioned by Saviano. I talked to some, but didn't dare raise the question of how they had got there.The book makes you look at Campania in a whole new way. Take, for example, the pair of buskers below our hotel room, on the causeway from the lungomare to the Castello dell'Ovo, a very popular tourist spot. They are terrible, badly recycling Neapolitan and global favourites on a fairly short loop. But strangely they have no rivals. At a much higher musical level we went to the opera, in the magnificent Teatro San Carlo, the world's oldest opera house. We saw Otello — the Verdi rather than the Bellini (which was actually premiered there). There were two intervals of 20 minutes when the audience repaired to a vast assembly room to drink champagne, network and be seen. Bourgeois elegance in profuse and extreme form. But I wondered, how many were Camorra connected?

And how many connected with the various anti-Mafia agencies? And how many both? A Californian tourist, walking behind us at Pompeii, remarked, "this place is bi-polar". He was actually talking about the weather, a sunshine/shower sequence much more familiar to the English than the Californians. But he could easily have been talking about Italian life as a whole. Years ago in Verona on the same unlucky day we were robbed and our car broke down. Innocenti mended the car immediately, offering excellent coffee and chatting about football while we waited. Yet when I arrived at Carabinieri HQ to report the robbery they were extremely unhelpful, grumpy and had obviously been sleeping.

Even in the late Seventies it was the same: I was visiting a jumpy Turin, bristling with guns after seven people had died in a battle with the Red Brigades. A few hours later and I was in a small town outside the city where people were chatting in the sun and grandfathers were eating ice creams with their grandchildren. It could not have been more relaxed. Then this year at Naples Airport baggage pick-up and security were the quickest and most efficient I have seen anywhere. Ditto, the system for picking up taxis. But then you are plunged into Neapolitan traffic: slow progress, appalling and aggressive driving and the city covered in the most amount of graffiti I have ever seen. Even my reading list reflected this contrasting nature. Gomorrah is a nasty book — the subject matter rather than the author, though he does seem to relish his subject at times. Helen Attlee's The Land Where Lemons Grow (2014) the opposite, a nice book, an account of Italian gardening, the cult of the citron in all its varieties, especially in Campania. I bought one of the giant ibridi citrons and ate it marinated in sugar as instructed: unusual and delicious.