In Campania d'autore we read “The City Punctuated” by Giuseppe Petrarca

The “Campania d'Autore” column starts again with a book that offers a history of southern Italy, as well as of the Neapolitan people.

A dramatic event that tore the entire territory and had repercussions on the human profile. The story is that of the 1980 earthquake, expertly treated in the book “La città puntellata” by the Neapolitan writer Giuseppe Petrarca and published by CentoAutori.

Petrarca, who has been collaborating for several years with the humanitarian organization, Nobel Peace Prize winner, “Doctors Without Borders”, has published “social thrillers” written for the publishing houses Homo Scrivens and Graus, in which he addresses thorny issues such as those related to pharmaceutical lobbies and the distressing reality of psychiatric hospitals. Publications that have credited him with numerous and well-known awards, as well as illustrious recognitions for his literary career.

“La città puntellata” takes us back to 1980, a terrible year, marked by more than one tragic event. The Ustica and Bologna train station massacres were followed by the earthquake, which, starting from Irpinia, spread its devastating power and reached Naples and Lucania. In a heartfelt analysis of those years and of the event itself, Giuseppe Petrarca retraces that still open wound as well as the desperation and human brutalization of the time, giving his literary work the identity and structure of a novel and not of an investigative book as one might think.

Synopsis
Naples is devastated by the earthquake of November 23, 1980. People pour into the streets and squares, ambulances rush to help the wounded, people dig frantically through the rubble in search of survivors. The failed miracle of San Gennaro a few months earlier, which is the prologue of the novel, becomes a harbinger of misfortune for a people accustomed to suffering and for this reason, perhaps, able to bear it better than others.

After an initial moment of confusion and fear, solidarity emerges and everyone, each in their own field and in their own way, makes themselves available to others. In the ninety terrifying seconds of the earthquake, in fact, the lives of the protagonists intersect: Dr. Roberto Vitale, a recent medical graduate who will work, from the first hours of the disaster, to save human lives; the teacher Mariangela Greco, struggling with the failure of her marriage to the entrepreneur Salvatore Nazzaro, the latter destroyed by the financial collapse of his company.

The journalist Antonio Di Carlo, correspondent for the newspaper “Il Mattino” in the areas of Lucania devastated by the earthquake, tormented by his heartbreaking and clandestine love with Mariangela; the professor Enza De Martino, colleague and friend of Mariangela, who will lose her husband Ciro in the collapse of her home and the vice-questor Francesco Amendola, grappling not only with the Camorra feuds but also with the fight against the criminal organizations that are throwing themselves on the reconstruction money.

A Naples torn in body and mind, in which the real rubble represents the metaphor of those that will fall on the civil conscience of the city in the years to come, the years of deregulation, of speculation, of the rampant subversive phenomenon, of the connivance between politics and the Camorra.

The book's prologue offers a suggestive description of the scene taking place inside Naples Cathedral, where the anxious people invoke the protection of San Gennaro through the liquefaction of their blood.

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It was September 19, 1980, and the Saint's miracle did not occur. A sign that left the awaiting faithful stunned and petrified. It heralded the disaster, which was not long in coming, and which materialized only two months later: on Sunday, November 23.

“Naples is a body impatient to rise again. Naples is a blood anxious to be reborn. A people in turmoil, eager to find, in that blood, the strength to move forward”

The five protagonists of the story are right there, in that church, each with their own feelings and suggestions, whose personal lives and traumas intertwine with the collective history. The author has inserted into his novel people who really existed in that time, of which he has received the supporting structure and then amplified it with fantasy.

The intent pursued in the book is not in fact the need for news, but the feeling of those who have experienced the pain of that dramatic event on their own skin, to probe the human soul. Enza, Mariangela, Ciro, Salvatore, Antonio, Francesco, the protagonists sensitively told by the literary talent of the author, are all crossed by an existential failure that has its roots in different causes, but they also represent the crumbling of an already dying society, which after the earthquake must deal with the corruption that has spread to the detriment of the tormented and turbulent people.

In this context dominated by precariousness and anguish, that “miracle” that did not come true, that unliquefied blood represents for the author the stone that fell on the territory in the guise of physical rubble scattered by the earthquake, which also translates into a stone that weighs on our consciences.

The parallels that describe the reality of the earthquake in Naples and Basilicata are compelling, evidenced by the fervent journalistic activity of the tormented Antonio De Carlo, a Lucanian, a member of Il Mattino, the newspaper that reported the news with tireless continuity and whose famous, historic headline, "Hurry!", is evoked here. It can be defined as a written cry—chilling and realistic—of the emergency dictated by the loss of innocent and unaware human lives.

“La città puntellata” is a fascinating book, which expresses Naples in all its aspects. From the history, to the author, to the publishing house, the Neapolitan city is testimony to a historical journey that still resonates in the soul of each of us, but also to the genius of a local author in his still suffering metropolis.

Annamaria Cafaro

Article published on September 25, 2022 - 17:03 AM - Annamaria Cafaro