The Importance of Place in Contemporary Italian Crime Fiction by Pezzotti Barbara;

Author:Pezzotti, Barbara;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Northeast, the Corroded Engine of Italy

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The Nordest [northeast] is a relatively new geographical and economic concept, and it is also a new setting for crime fiction. It includes three regions of Italy—namely, the Veneto, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, and Trentino-Alto Adige—which border the former Yugoslavia and Austria. This part of Italy was long neglected by economists, as it was characterized first by the presence of small farmers and then, starting from the 1970s, by myriad small and medium-size family-owned enterprises, as opposed to the corporations of Lombardy and Piedmont (Turri 2004, 187–88). The crisis of big industry in the 1980s drew economists’ and journalists’ attention to these three regions whose export-oriented, small-business economy developed at a fast pace, while the population’s welfare increased dramatically (188). Now described as the “engine of Italian economy,” the northeast has become a case study for scholars in Italy and worldwide. It was in this period that the term Nordest was coined and a common identity around this definition was born (Jori 2007, 119–21).[1]

In thirty years, the life and topography of the northeast have changed dramatically. From being three peaceful and marginal regions of poor farmers and hard-working small entrepreneurs, they have become a huge and indistinct industrialized territory.[2] These changes could not go unnoticed. As Saveria Chemotti points out, the territory underwent a radical metamorphosis that obliged the Veneto writers of the past twenty years to change perspective and describe a completely different reality (1999, 36–38). So-called literary writers have limited themselves to recording these changes in a nihilistic prose, or they have written about individual experiences of alienation, which is sometimes tied to childhood memories (Fuchs 2010, 36–37, 42). Crime writer Massimo Carlotto (b. 1956), who is also one of the first authors to address these transformations, has, on the other hand, highlighted corruption, consumerism, and lack of values following the dramatic rise in wealth in the area, shaping his novels as political pamphlets.[3] For the Italian press, the northeast of Italy in the 1990s was the symbol of a business-oriented and efficient Italy, in the same way that Bologna represented the benchmark for good administration.[4] Starting from a very painful personal experience, Carlotto describes it as an undistinguished, bleak area as a result of the homogenization caused by a wild capitalist economy. Carlotto’s stories also show a corrupt society heavily involved in illegal business and highlight the increasing feeling of estrangement from the rest of Italy growing among the northeastern population, which led to the birth of new xenophobic and separatist political parties (Signore and Trocino 2008). In so doing, he uncovers hypocrisy and illegality in the new Italian land of miracles, and stretching to the extreme the golden rules of classic detective fiction, he gives a portrait of the northeast that is very different from the official image of “Italy’s engine” so overused in the Italian press and in politicians’ speeches. His representation of the urban sprawl gives an account not of the “branching city,” as in Lucarelli’s books, but of a centerless area that has forgotten the solidarity of its past.

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