Once upon a time there was Naples

Guappi and sciantose, politicians and heroes, the honor of the knife and the cowardice of the gun, narrated by a poet/alter ego who seeks the mystery hidden in the soul of a city on the streets. Report on the shelves for Colonnese Editore, after the historic first Mondadori edition of 2012, ‘The Neapolitan book of the dead’ by Francesco Palmieri and with it the controversial epic of a dark and glorious season of Naples, enclosed between the end of the kingdom of the Bourbons and the Great War. At AGI the writer and journalist tells of his return to bookstores.
What is ‘the Neapolitan book of the dead’?
A work that uses the eyes and language of a poet at the time famous Ferdinando Russo, to give life to the crucial passage from the capital of Kingdom to the capital of a city of a city. A historical phase that still marks different aspects of the Naples relationship with the country. From Garibaldi to Belle Époque the Neapolitans lived this downgrading by replicating him with an artistic and cultural flowering similar to that of the 70s and 80s of the 1900s, when the wars of Camorra made the budget of voices such as those of Daniele, Troisi and Bennato, while Andy Warhol found similarities with NY in the Gallery of Lucio Ama. In dark periods the city reacts with art, in a way that accentuates its intrinsic contradiction.

Why did Saviano called this book in 2012 the prequel to Gomorra?
At its release the text had a transversal response, meeting the taste of the most different criticism. In fact, sixty years of history told by an artist who loved reality. I used the narrative voice of Ferdinando Russo because it represents a singular figure: among the founders of Il Mattino di Serao and Scarfoglio, he was a poet, playwright and lyricist of songs still among the Neapolitan classics. I am interested in the fascination for worlds like that of the underworld, which he attended and understood while condemning him. Living firsthand the transition between the ancient and twentieth -century Camorra, from the knife to the gun, from courage to cowardice, Russo knew events that often could not tell as a reporter, so as not to incur the Risorgimento censorship. Thus rekindled the stratagem of the fiction, using poetry and novel.
Why is the period between 1860 and the 1920s for Naples for Naples so important?
Because it has similarities with topicality. But today there is no narrative that includes all aspects. We have the yellow novel of serial entertainment and the ‘terrible’ narration of Gomorrah and the like, more recently replaced by the Epopea of ​​Ferrante. But Russo was a journalist who lived with empathy the facts of the road, loved her and knew how to see light in the dark. He invented two words ended up in our vocabulary:
‘Scugnizzi’ and ‘speck’.
Did the book require a lot of documentation work?
In the research I placed myself a bond: everything I would have made Russo told him really happened to him and the narratives on the loser heroes who came from all over the world to fight for the Bourbons finding themselves in his availability as a reader. I also studied and reconstructed his private events, as is done for the creation of a character.
And what about style?
I read everything he wrote, a vast and varied production of which I looked for the streams also in the turnover. Among many activities he was also director of the magazine ‘Latin sail’, where he hosted, intercepting them first, the Neapolitan futurists. He also attended Gabriele D’Annunzio, in the years in which he cooked with the dialect by writing ‘to Vucchella’, a song that remained in the traditional repertoire.
The Neapolitan book of the dead ‘tells a historical moment of passage: what is the relationship with’ La leather ‘of Malaparte?
Given that the Neapolitan nights are cyclical, that of Malaparte is a compliant book in describing the horror, which will be resolved to those of those who today tell the Naples of the underworld by restoring a only dark image of the city. But I repeat: from a literary point of view, the story is currently incomplete. While cinema, with authors such as Martone and Sorrentino, manages to have a wider breath even by drawing on books, the Narrative of Naples proceeds to sectors: Autophication, Yellow, Female friendship stories.
Why propose the re -edition of a 2012 novel now?
I have listened to those who in recent years have defined my ‘cult’ book. He does not return to the bookstore with Mondadori because today the great publishing is in a vision crisis. Better a historical acronym of Naples as Colonnese, who has great care of a catalog that boasts names like that of Roberto De Simone. Books have always immersed themselves and then re -emerge; We think of the case of ‘Malacqua’, which in the 70s was the victim of the political prejudices related to the head for which its author wrote, Nicola Pugliese. On the novel the silence fell first, then he started circulating in a photocopy remaining clandestine for decades, until Pironti republished him in 2013 and finally Bompiani still gave him new life in 2022, with my introduction.

What do you expect for your text?

I know it is not an easy work, the other day a bookseller has told me, because unfortunately the average reader is also in crisis, as well as the average author and the same editorial system. By now the catalogs look like a burlesque casting: before the book you look at the character and if this does not resort to some strange, true or metaphorical tattoo, to give a stature, it risks being depreciated. Once the literary value counted: Ungaretti, Montale or Pugliese had no other distinctive sign than that of being of the authors. My novel tells an era in which people did not cry on them like the fake turtle of ‘Alice’s adventures in Wonderland’, but did it for reasons that really required tears. It tells of heroes who fought for the Bourbons despite knowing that they had already lost. He wants to make the honor of weapons to a world that is gone.