Italy: National dignity at stake

This is a point where Roberto Saviano really should be enjoying his life. The 29-year-old author's first book, Gomorra, has been translated into 33 languages and has sold more than a million copies in Italy alone - a country where sales of 50,000 are often enough to land atop the best seller list. A film based on the book won rave reviews in Cannes and has been chosen as Italy's candidate for the Oscars. The writer's royalties have reached seven figures.

But the death threats that Saviano's exposé of the Naples mob and the lurid underworld it inhabits (the book's name is a play on words combining the Biblical city of sin, Gomorrah, and the Camorra, the official name of the Neapolitan crime families) have a way of putting that success into perspective.

Italian police have uncovered a plot to kill Saviano before Christmas involving a car bomb and aggressive rhetoric against the man who called attention to a group long accustomed to operating in the shadow of a group more visible than the Sicilian Mafia. The suspects remain at large, and security experts admit eliminating the possibility of a hit is all but impossible.

Of course, writers are often threatened over their work. Russia's Aleksander Solzhenitsyn and Czech dissident Vaclav Havel were famously persecuted and imprisoned during the Cold War, for example. And nearly 20 years ago, Salman Rushdie was condemned to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini after writing The Satanic Verses. But none of those instances took place in a country that claims to be an important, modern and stable democracy.

To be sure, Italy has problems that may seem more important. Its economy has been the "sick man of Europe" for nearly a generation. The country's prime minister has been charged with more than two-dozen felonies since entering politics, and his control over the country's media is stronger than any single man's control in any other major economy. Corruption and cronyism remain the rule rather than the exception.

But for many, those problems are abstract, while the threats against Saviano are concrete. And is there anything more basic than a country's ability to protect its citizens?

When Saviano wrote Gomorra in 2006, he took the precaution of installing bars on the windows of his Naples home. Then he hired an armed bodyguard, and soon after the government provided him with an around-the-clock security detail, and he was moved to a protected military barracks. For the last several weeks he has moved between safe houses, reportedly sleeping in a different bed every two or three nights.

Rushdie, whose death threat was lifted after nearly a decade of his living on the run, said he believed the threat against Saviano was greater than the threat that he, Rushdie, faced under Khomeini's fatwah.

In a rare recent interview, with the daily newspaper La Republicca, Saviano agreed about the seriousness of the threats, drawing a parallel between his life and that of Francesco Schiavone, the jailed Camorra boss who many say still rules the clan from his prison cell.

"Schiavone is in a cell, watched by police, and he deserves it for his crimes," Saviano said. "But what is my crime? Why must I live like a recluse, like a leper? ... I only wanted to tell a story, the story of my people, of my land, the story of its humiliation ... I want a life! I want a house. I want to fall in love, I want to drink a beer in public. I want to go for a walk, to take in the sun, to walk in the rain. I want to see my mother without fearing for my life and without scaring her."

When Saviano recently began talking about leaving Italy behind to move to a country where he would be safe, it sparked an outcry among Italians who want him to stay put as a symbol of the country's fight against organized crime. But Saviano says he has no desire to be a martyr.

Italian President Giorgio Napolitano has expressed outrage at the situation, calling the threats against Saviano a "challenge to the civilized conscience of the country itself," adding that, "what is at stake here is a battle for the fundamental values of freedom, national dignity and the prestige of a democratic Italy in Europe."

For the time being, at least, it seems to be a battle Italy may be losing.