Ruggero Cappuccio

The subject of the novel is Naples: “a corpse in an advanced state of decomposition.” Diego Ventre is a brilliant and refined lawyer, but in reality a Camorrista. He learns from a volcanologist that an eruption will destroy a large part of the city. Diego sees in this catastrophe the opportunity to renew Naples, to halt its decline, but he also realizes that enormous profits can be made. He keeps the news secret and begins a series of speculative operations. Meanwhile, he falls in love with Luce, the daughter of a prominent aristocratic family. A courtship begins, through which Diego can display all his classical learning and refined tastes. This does not prevent him from continuing his criminal activities, spinning business schemes, corrupting, and threatening. Naples is destroyed by the fury of nature; Diego and Luce marry, but on their very wedding day Luce discovers that she has married a violent mafioso. She flees, is captured by Diego’s enemy, and raped multiple times as an act of defilement; yet at the very moment of the rape Diego arrives, kills his rival, and points his gun at the young woman’s chest. Does he want to kill her according to a mafia code that cannot tolerate one’s woman having belonged to another man, or is it merely a protective gesture? We will never know, for at that very moment Diego is killed by his brother. The author draws upon an idea from Curzio Malaparte in *The Skin* (the eruption of Vesuvius as the destruction and creation of a new Naples), but this motif remains merely in the background. In truth, the entire novel unfolds around Diego—a villain, yet one ultimately admired, and an instrument for an aestheticizing indulgence in the beauty and ugliness of Naples. The weakness of the plot, the shallow character analysis, the perpetual invocations of an unreal city made solely of monuments, the protagonist’s pedantic and inconclusive soliloquies: these are all factors that reduce the narrative to a sequence of images, of sketches. As the author wrote regarding Naples, > it is a novel without a story, a novel without chapters. The words seem assembled at random, without a true before and without the hope of an after . Why not read it? It is pointless.