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I

THE NIGHT OF 1343

My Night

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, everyone, 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.