Anyone who gets involved with the Comorra, the oldest and largest criminal organization in Italy, will no longer be able to sleep peacefully. The young writer Roberto Saviano knew this when he published his documentary study “Gomorrah” in 2006. And yet he probably didn’t expect that from now on he wouldn’t be able to go get bread rolls without police protection.
The book with which he became famous and which was also successfully filmed and made into an impressive series was also influenced by the experience of his father, who, as a doctor, provided medical care to a victim of the Camorra against the wishes of the organization and was then beaten up. It is almost impossible to overcome the power of the criminal family.
Together with the art-gifted Israeli illustrator Asaf Hanuka (“The Realist”), the Italian now tells what it means to take on evil. It not only describes how the Neapolitan mafia infiltrates a large part of social and economic life and changes it according to its own ideas, but also what it means to be constantly threatened by potential assassins who want to force him to leave his homeland of Italy.
Saviano stayed, faced the danger, became more politically active than many of his professional colleagues – and with “I’m Still Alive – In the Crosshairs of the Mafia” (Cross Cult, 30 euros) he still makes a bitter (and sometimes somewhat self-pitying) confession , which makes it plainly clear that the fight for the truth cannot be carried out without sacrifice.
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All images: Cross Cult