Dai nostri archivi: Città italiane in giallo, Napoli

April 12, 2026·22 min·2 clips

Matilde Serao, nominated six times for the Nobel Prize, wrote 'The Belly of Naples' and a mystery novel about a traveler with a mysterious package.

1. SBS Italian presents a literary tour of crime fiction set in Naples, guided by Monash University lecturer Barbara Pezzotti. 2. Pezzotti is a lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne; the host is unnamed but conducts the interview in Italian; the series is framing Italian cities as stages for crime narratives. 3. The episode answers the question: how has Naples' unique social, cultural, and historical character shaped Italian crime fiction across two centuries? 4. Pezzotti traces the origins of Neapolitan crime writing to the early eighteenth century, before modern detective fiction, in the tradition of French feuilletons — sensation novels of mystery and horror rather than investigations. 5. She identifies Francesco Mastriani as the earliest significant figure, citing his 1852 novel The Thief of Sorrento and The Mysteries of Naples (1869-70) as establishing the city's dark literary identity. 6. Matilde Serao emerges as the episode's most remarkable figure: a writer, journalist, and the first woman to found and direct an Italian newspaper (Il Corriere di Roma, then Il Corriere di Napoli), nominated six times for the Nobel Prize. 7. Serao's 1912 novella The Cut Hand is described as freely available online and follows traveler Roberto Alimena who wakes on a train to find a mysterious stranger and an unaccounted-for package among his luggage. 8. In the 1980s, Attilio Veraldi brought an American hardboiled sensibility to Neapolitan crime fiction, writing characters who move between legality and illegality in a city dominated by the Camorra. 9. Veraldi's detective Alessandro Iovine and later Inspector Apicella are described as protagonists from the margins of society, inverting the Agatha Christie tradition of crimes among the privileged classes. 10. Massimo Siviero, writing from the 1990s onward, published a 2003 essay titled How to Write a Neapolitan Yellow, advising writers that Naples' Mediterranean port identity demands characters who are verbose and theatrical. 11. Siviero's own detective Gabriele Abruzzese is described as old-fashioned — he uses a walking stick, rents rooms, and is served home-cooked meals — while solving theatrically elaborate cases involving poisoned arrows. 12. Pezzotti reads a passage from a Siviero novel describing the Piazza Mercato neighborhood with a muezzin calling Friday prayers and a Catholic church whose domes show Arabesque architectural influence, illustrating Naples as a literal crossroads of Mediterranean civilizations. 13. Elena Ferrante is introduced as a crime author first by virtue of her own anonymity — the mystery of her real identity was itself a form of crime narrative — though it has since been resolved. 14. Ferrante's 1999 novel L'Amore Molesto is summarized: protagonist Delia returns from Bologna to Naples after her mother Amalia dies under mysterious circumstances, and her investigation reveals a childhood shaped by gender violence in a violent, patriarchal society. 15. A passage from L'Amore Molesto is read, portraying Naples as rainy, gray, hostile, and full of men directing invasive gazes at women — the opposite of the sunny, comic Naples of 1950s films with Gina Lollobrigida or Sophia Loren. 16. Roberto Saviano's 2006 Gomorrah is positioned in the true crime tradition of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Leonardo Sciascia, as a journalistic investigation rather than a novel, conducted in real time within Camorra-controlled territory. 17. Saviano's most striking finding is that Camorra clans profited from disposing toxic waste in the Caserta area, used those profits to build luxury villas on the contaminated land, and subsequently breathed the poisoned air — and disease rates in the area have measurably increased. 18. A passage from Gomorrah is read in which Saviano rides a Vespa through Secondigliano and Scampia, noting the wide oxygenated roads that contrast with the historic center, and reflecting on how the neighborhood's Neapolitan dialect name means 'open land' — now buried under concrete housing blocks that became drug trafficking infrastructure. 19. The tone is academic but accessible — Pezzotti uses personal asides ('I went to read some of these old texts') and the format alternates between historical overview and read passages, giving the episode the texture of a university lecture broadcast as radio. 20. Best suited for listeners interested in Italian literature, true crime, or European urban history; not recommended for those seeking plot summaries or who are uncomfortable with discussions of organized crime, gender violence, and environmental crime.

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