Scampia, the satellite town in the north of Naples, gets a lot of political visitors these days. Giuseppe Conte, former prime minister and incumbent leader of the left-wing populist Five Star Movement, was there last Saturday. In Scampia he started his national tour in defense of the citizen money. Conte’s government introduced the basic income in March 2019 and celebrated it as a milestone in the eradication of poverty, especially in the economically disadvantaged south. The new right-wing coalition under Giorgia Meloni wants to abolish citizen income because it tempts people of working age to do nothing instead of looking for a job, according to the Prime Minister’s office. In Scampia, where around a third of all households receive a basic income, Conte warned of nationwide protests by the marginalized people should the Meloni government implement its plan for social indifference.
A few days before Conte, Naples Mayor Gaetano Manfredi was in Scampia for the inauguration of the new campus of the University of Naples “Federico II”. Italy’s reigning beauty queen, Zeudi Di Palma, attended the inauguration ceremony as a kind of patron saint. “Miss Italia” is twenty years old, comes from Scampia herself and is studying sociology there. In the future, however, she will still have to take the metro to the university in the old town, because the new campus belongs to the medical faculty and not to the social sciences faculty, where Di Palma is studying. The university will bring “light and hope” to Scampia, said “Miss Italia” with a sash and crown. Mayor Manfredi nodded to this.
“We are not Gomorrah”
And while some see the fuse smoldering in the silos for hunger riots and others celebrate the construction of a university as a glimmer of hope, there is graffiti all over the city on the walls in which Scampia is compared to the sinful city of Gomorrah, which in the Bible story is about the angry Creator God covered with fire and brimstone. “No Gomorrah” is the most common saying. Or: “Scampia is not Gomorrah”. Or also: “We are not Gomorrah”.
The city, which lies under a dreary veil of clouds these days, owes its unpopular nickname to the journalist and writer Roberto Saviano. Born in Naples in 1979, Saviano achieved his international breakthrough in 2006 with his factual novel about the entanglement of organized crime and political power in the southern Italian region of Campania and the metropolitan area of Naples. Saviano’s book is entitled “Gomorrah – Journey to the Economic Empire of the Camorra”. The Camorra is the mafia organization in Campania. Once upon a time, the mafias, which are rooted in southern Italy but have long been active internationally – in addition to the Camorra, the Cosa Nostra in Sicily, the ‘Ndrangheta in Calabria and the Sacra Corona Unita in Apulia – fought bloody battles over distribution. Today, they hardly dispute each other’s territories and business areas. You work side by side, sometimes with each other.
The clans didn’t like the book
For Saviano, his Gomorra-Camorra bestseller, which has now been translated into more than fifty languages and sold a good ten million copies worldwide, was both a blessing and a curse. He became rich and famous, but above all lonely, as he repeatedly laments. The clans did not like what Saviano divulged about them in detail in his book: about Europe’s largest drug hub in the run-down high-rise complex “Le Vele di Scampia”, about the bloody accounts of enemy Camorra families at the “Faida di Sampia” of 2004 and 2005, one Feuding Camorra families with daily murders in broad daylight. The writer, then 26 years old, received death threats. Since then, Saviano has been under police protection around the clock and has to constantly change his apartment. For friendships, for a partnership, there is hardly any room in his life of protected solitude. You have to believe Saviano when he says he often wished the Camorra had killed him.
