Roberto Saviano’s latest book is a portrait of contemporary Italy. Roberto Saviano’s third book is a portrait of contemporary Italy. Employing a narrative style reminiscent of Gomorrah, Saviano tells eight stories in eight chapters, compelling case studies that probe the most significant issues affecting Italy both in recent years and more persistently since unification. Each of these stories explains with Saviano’s precocious authority how Italy works – and, in some cases, how it does not work. There are familiar problems: a general lack of understanding and appreciation of the value of national unity, of what it means to be a single nation state; political mud-slinging and the incessant smears that have become an integral part of public life; the expansion of organised crime in Northern Italy; the never-ending rubbish crisis in Naples; these and other matters afflicting Italy are considered with an emotional intensity and clarity of vision. But there are also stories which inspire hope, including that of Don Panizza, the priest who travelled from the North to assist disabled children in the South, finding himself fighting the Calabrian ‘ngrangheta once there; or those of Piergiorgio Welby, euthanasia activist, and Piero Calamandrei, anti-fascist professor, poet and politician.
In November and December 2010 Roberto Saviano starred in a series of four two-hour, interview-based television programs which focused on issues of contemporary importance, filmed at an undisclosed location surrounded by security. The show achieved more than eight million viewers on its first airing, more than nine million on its second, and the ratings continued to grow after that – comfortably RAI 3’s biggest audience since its creation in 1979. Vieni via con me develops some of the themes broached in the television series, and – with over 500,000 copies in circulation in Italy – it is one of the most important books of the year.