You won’t recognise a member of the mafia. Whether you’re in Naples, Paris, London or Mexico City, you wouldn’t know the member of a crime syndicate from the next guy. Actually, it’s always been like that: the mafia have always looked exactly the same as their law-abiding neighbours. Omertà, or the code of silence, originates precisely from this – quite apart from the fear of retaliation, omertà begins from a natural inclination not to betray one of your own. By extension, this code of silence can afflict people, whether ordinary people or politicians, who don’t want to be told stories that clash with the picture-postcard image they would like to project of their own country.

Back in 2009, it was Silvio Berlusconi who said: “If I find the man who made the new serial of La Piovra [The Octopus] and who writes books about the mafia which give us a bad name in the world, I swear I will throttle him.” It was an unfortunate choice of words, but it reflects what many Italian politicians think. It was [former prime minister] Matteo Renzi who labelled those, like myself, who abandoned the glowing narrative which had it that Italy had recovered from its economic crisis, “merchants of doom”.

Italy has the most dangerous and powerful mafia in the world; it is also the best at telling stories about the mafia. These stories are our defence against organised crime, because how else do we learn about it? Some examples: An animated film entitled Gatta Cenerentola (Cinderella the Cat) has appeared, produced by Mad Entertainment (a kind of Studio Ghibli in Naples). The film shows what Naples could be if the Camorra were kept out of activities, and it could be allowed to flourish – and how things really are, where nothing is safe from mafia infiltration and change frightens even those who would benefit from it.

Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1986 Il Camorrista (inspired by Giuseppe Marrazzo’s book) remains topical even decades later and manages to explain what it means to belong to criminal organisations where there is no way out. Il Camorrista showed that to be a member of the mafia is a contradiction of life itself: it is guile, subterfuge, betrayals, it is affections sacrificed on the altar of power, vendettas, it is the impossibility of being able to live without feeling hounded.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘My own work is influenced by these precedents, especially the decision to adopt the sole viewpoint of the criminal’ ... Roberto Saviano. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images

At the same time La Piovra was showing on TV, so even then, there were already two ways of treating organised crime. In Il Camorrista, the viewpoint was purely that of the criminal; while in La Piovra the lead was a police chief, Corrado Cattani, a tormented character who personified the struggle of the state against the mafia.

My own work is influenced by these precedents, especially the decision to adopt the sole viewpoint of the criminal; the choice is both considered and deliberate, and it is one which I will defend. When I am asked: “Why is it that in the TV series Gomorrah there are no good characters?” the ingenuousness of the question almost brings a smile to my lips. A teacher realises that his students are part of a criminal gang, maybe of one that took part in a shoot-out or a stabbing. What do you imagine the teacher can do? Report them? Talk to his students? Would you ask a teacher to sacrifice his own life? Or maybe people who ask me that question would like to see on TV what does not exist. They might want to be reassured and think: I don’t have to worry and I can stay here comfortably on my sofa, enjoying the show.

I have chosen instead, to want to know what is actually happening so as to be able to take action. I want to know how criminal organisations work in real terms, not how we imagine they work. I want to know how members live: whether they believe in God and who they pray to; I want to know whether before going out to commit murder they cuddle their children, kiss their wives, whether they manage to love despite the cruelty they are capable of.

“The mafia is a human phenomenon and like all human phenomena, it has a beginning, middle and will therefore also have an end,” Giovanni Falcone used to say. Falcone was the judge killed by the Cosa Nostra in 1992 while studying its weak points. When criminal organisations kill, it’s because they’re weak. By using violence they intend to instil fear and get results that can’t be managed through mediation. When these facts of mafia life are kept secret, if they remain within courtrooms and prison cells, reported only in the local press or crime columns, the bloodshed will have achieved its aim. But when the story is told, it’s as if a short-circuit occurs; a story can overcome the rule of silence and help us understand the dynamics of the organisation and its members. All it takes is a book, a television programme, a film to shed light on just one aspect – this is all it takes to trigger a revolution.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I want to know whether before going out to commit murder they cuddle their children’ ... Gomorrah. Photograph: Gianni Fiorito/2017 Beta Film

In Ettore Scola’s 1974 film C’eravamo Tanto Amati (We Used to Be So loved) a small provincial cinema is showing Vittorio de Sica’s 1948 film, the Bicycle Thieves, set during Italy’s economic depression. One character in C’eravamo Tanto Amati, Professor Caprigno, is so outraged by De Sica’s film; he gets up and declares: “Films such as these are an offence to grace, poetry and beauty. These dregs and slums denigrate us in the face of the world.” Sometimes I feel as if we have never left that little provincial cinema, because the world is full of Professor Caprignos. A lot of them came out of the woodwork when Gomorrah (the book) started to be successful. And still today, many criticise Gomorrah (the TV series), invoking the same charges: Neapolitans feel humiliated, and Italians in general believe it spoils the image of their homeland.

What scares people about films that tell the truth about criminality? Everything is taken from facts. The narrative is successful when the characters are authentic, with all the violence of their contradictions, because it shouldn’t be easy to like them. They are captured in the midst of the daily misery and hell of their lives. The forces of law and order and civil society take a back seat because that’s how it is in the minds of the characters we are depicting.

Criminal organisations are like governments that operate by other means, like the multinationals that manage their business with similar ferocity. In The City of God, Saint Augustine writes: “If you take away justice, what are nations but massive gangs of thieves?” When politics loses the path of justice, it sheds its flesh to reveal a skeleton of banditry. When you offer people mafia crime stories, you are speaking to people who can see in the stories of gangland the raw nature of power: abuse, blackmail, subjugation. Some will say, where is the consolation?

If it’s consolation you’re after, go look for it elsewhere.



•Translation by Clare Longrigg, David Budgen and Lorenzo Tondo



