ES 17, what remains of the Camorra between stone and paper

by time news

“This will kill that”: this will kill that one, ruled Claude Frollo, archdeacon of Notre-Dame, meaning that the paper books would replace the “stone books”. In other words, the literary narrative – this was what Victor Hugo made him say – is much less perishable than that expressed in architecture, even in the most majestic cathedral.

Very old children

Unaware of the lesson, the Camorra relies on plastic representation to articulate its memories between murals and altars: the most sensational, that of the head of the Paranza dei Bambini Emanuele Sibillo, has just been dismantled from the courtyard at 26 of vico Santi Filippo e Giacomo in the heart of the ancient Neapolitan center. A few tens of meters separate the building from the Church of Santa Maria delle Anime del Purgatorio in Arco, where it is a devotional custom to place the photos of one’s relatives among the skulls of unknown ancient dead, which the humidity in a short time decomposes as it does with the meats. The Sibillo clan pursued its criminal activities – twenty-one arrests carried out by the carabinieri – in the shadow surrounding the luminous cone created around the figure of Emanuele, killed in 2015 at the age of 19 during a raid against the rival gang of Buonerba. Ruthless and very young, but also very aged children, it was fatal that the children of the Paranza would leave, together with the trail of crimes, that of a dramatic emotion for those who burn their lives too soon.

© Francesco Palmieri

The altar to Emanuele Sibillo

Emanuele Sibillo has become ES17 on the walls between piazza San Gaetano and via San Biagio dei Librai and on the arms where it was tattooed as an initial, on Facebook pages, in web and TV documentaries. 17 is the number of the alphabet corresponding to the initial of the surname Sibillo, but at the time of his death it was also the shirt number of the football idol Hamsik and had been – drawn in the flames on Emanuele’s skin – a symbolic wish to burn the bad luck. He did not succeed, he allegedly found in an interview the premature widow Mariarca Savarese, grandson of a boss of Healthcare and already a mother of two children (the second was still pregnant when her husband died).

Kitsch, b & b and the city that plays

The shrine imposed in the courtyard of the building, with Sibillo’s cinerary urn, the kitsch simulacrum dismantled by the firefighters and carabinieri, emphasized the holy place of a Camorra space. Not a cult but a tribute to “power”: spontaneous for some, forced for others, those who had to pay a bribe in front of the altar. A few tens of meters separate that palace from the statue of the Nile god, the ‘body’ of the ancient center where – before the pandemic and soon – the tourist flow from San Gregorio Armeno to the Sansevero Chapel transforms Naples according to the “Venice scheme”. A city that acts itself for the benefit of visitors, where b & bs have emptied the homes of old families and evicted domestic spirits. Monacielli e beautiful ‘mbriane now they play the most theater of themselves while the toolmakers quickly change the sets for the next act.

emanuele sibillo camorra stone and paper

But – and therefore – Archdeacon Frollo is right again this time. It is not on the walls and on the stones, it is not in the figurative kitsch that the memories of the Camorra will be prolonged. It will rather be through judicial documents and articles crammed into newspaper libraries or virtual deposits. But even more and above all they will remain, as they have remained until now, thanks to literature. Already now, less than six years after the killing of Emanuele Sibillo, whoever wants to reconstruct his criminal, social and family context, succeeds better by reading The paranza of children e Fierce kiss, the two novels that Roberto Saviano drew from that story. He was inspired by it without betraying the factual elements by fantasy. So before him they had done it once Francesco Mastriani e Matilde Serao. Or, for Sicily, a Sciascia with The day of the owl (and not only). He had done it Ferdinando Russo, which in the Black chronicle of People and the underworld between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries he left a poetic portrait – also in the sense that it was in verse – but very exact of the urchins who would, growing up, become lost souls of common crime or organized crime.

emanuele sibillo camorra stone and paper

© Francesco Palmieri

Francesco Mastriani

Fiction and premonition

Later Giuseppe Marotta, albeit in scattered pages, he would have rendered with succinct strokes a mirrored idea of ​​the famous guappo Luigi Campolongo, as or almost better than Eduardo De Filippo in Mayor of the Rione Sanità. And in more recent years than themselves they would have written Joseph Misso (The marble lions) who was the boss of the same neighborhood, and Giacomo Cavalcanti (Journey into imperfect silence).

Even now Russo, Mastriani, Serao remain more exhaustive references than many historians and essayists for those who want to reconstruct certain Neapolitan periods with precision. And already now, instead of mending the minute offal of the chronicles, Paranza e Kiss di Saviano clarify the reasons for the altar at ES17. But the literature, in some cases, even foreshadows. Giuseppe Montesano in the early 2000s, with the novel Of this lying life he had outlined a certain kitschy and insolent Camorra that dreams of Naples as a pretentious actress of herself in the megalomaniac dream of the Negromonte family. Fiction yes, but up to a certain point.

The Ferrantian “bleeding” between facts and stories has always been in force when it comes to the Camorra.

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