NAPLES 1343

A historian traces the origins of organized crime in southern Italy to medieval politics.

Feniello begins his narrative with an incident that happened on the street in Naples: the execution of three young men with ties to the local mob. Turning history into a brooding philosophical essay, Feniello wonders about the “source of all this savagery” and whether it has its origins in “something…so deep-rooted that it has carved its way into the viscera of time, allowing the weed of corruption to grow and germinate.” Mixed metaphor (do weeds regularly grow in viscera?) and all, he moves on to discuss an incident in the 1343 of his title, when Neapolitan freebooters seized a Genoese merchant ship, beheaded its owner, and divvied up the spoils—an act worthy of the gibbet, that, but one that Feniello attributes to the roiling politics of contending realms and some very poor policies, including taxing the poor in a time of plague and famine. Those doing the taxing may have had ducat signs in their eyes, but the people had nothing: “Southern Italy was screaming with hunger.” Feniello then charts the growth of antimonarchical resistance and the entrenchment of political power in a handful of local families, giving birth to “a hungry new Neapolitan, a man of both clan and family, a man quick to draw his sword, both solitary and violent.” Feniello’s thesis would seem to be something of a stretch in time, though not in kind: most historians trace the rise of the Mafia to resistance in Sicily, not Naples, against French and Spanish occupiers, though the basis of power in family ties is right. Correct or not, Feniello’s wandering narrative waxes a bit too purple for comfort and often strays from the point.

Of some interest to students of medieval Italian history, less so to those of organized crime.