“Inferno 1860 – Un noir napoletano” by Marco Lapegna (400 pages, €18,00) is available in all bookstores and online.
“Inferno 1860 – A Neapolitan Noir” is a detective story that is part of the Rosso&Nero series by Edizioni Rogiosi. We are in the scorching Neapolitan summer of 1860. While Garibaldi and his army of volunteers are moving up the peninsula and the administration of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies is heading towards disintegration, the first-rank inspector of the Bourbon police Gaetano Casagrande is charged with investigating a delicate case of double homicide: the lifeless bodies of an elderly street vendor and the wife of a judge belonging to the high Neapolitan aristocracy are found in the same apartment.
The scorching heat, social tensions and the discomfort he feels at work make the days of Inspector Casagrande, a man loyal to the institutions and, at the same time, deeply disappointed by corrupt superiors and colleagues who compete for the profits of shady Camorra dealings, hell.
In the first weeks, the investigations into the mysterious case unfold between sumptuous homes and sordid warehouses, where the man delves into the lives of those who in one way or another have reasons for resentment towards one of the victims. But with the sovereign act of the king, who grants the Constitution at the end of June, everything seems to precipitate into civil war, and the police are removed from all duties by the new minister Liborio Romano. The dutiful inspector does not give up and continues his research alone, while the world that orbits around him crumbles day after day.
By intertwining the detective investigation with real historical events, the author's aim is to construct a noir novel while at the same time recounting the daily life of Naples in the decisive months that led to the unification of Italy.
Read also: www.difesa.it/Content/150anniversario
In this work, Lapegna paints a picture of a tumultuous and lively city, populated by lazy and listless guards, immigrants from Puglia in search of a better life, spies from the Kingdom of Sardinia, petty thieves, priests engaged in reactionary homilies and liberal lawyers. A land balanced between a past full of contradictions and a future full of unknowns, eternally suspended between the submissive wait for external help and the desire to participate in person in the epochal change. A change that promises benefits for all, but perhaps not worthy of the price that each will have to pay.
The epilogue, which takes place one year after the event, closes the stories of the novel's protagonists against the backdrop of the first inconsistencies of the unitary state.
See also: www.rogiosi.it
THE AUTHOR
Marco Lapegna was born in Naples in 1963, where he still lives with his wife and two children. In 1986 he graduated in Mathematics, and since 2001 he has been a university professor of Computer Science at the University of Naples Federico II, where he has also held institutional coordination positions. In 2014 he wrote the short novel “Il posto dell'anima”, available on the self-publishing platform www.ilmiolibro.it. “Inferno 1860 – Un noir napoletano” is his first novel with a historical setting.
Article published on 2 July 2020 - 10:00
