Spoilt brats

Rome in 2016 sounds hellish, the way Nicola Lagioia describes it. Rubbish blew through the streets, rats frightened the tourists and “cavorted” in the hospitals. Vandals decapitated the statues of poets and “everyone peed everywhere” – even the author, who comes from Puglia, but let his standards slip after moving to the capital. When in Rome, etc.

To illustrate the citizens’ disillusionment, Lagioia points to the time when hundreds of new bicycles were delivered for a bike-sharing scheme: “After a month, nothing remained of those bikes. The Romans threw them off bridges, burned them, vandalised them in every possible way, destroyed them with a blind, primordial fury”. People were enraged, he writes, by the suggestion that you can “cure a dying man with some aspirin”. Rome may not be unusually dangerous, but, he avers, it is violent “on a psychic level”.

This is the depressing setting for a horrific crime that took place in March 2016: twenty-three-year-old Luca Varani was murdered, after hours of torture, by Marco Prato and Manuel Foffo in an apartment on the outskirts of Rome. Prato and Foffo were middle-class young men from supportive families, but had become disaffected and dangerously unmoored. Foffo had abandoned his studies in law, but could count on work whenever he wanted it at his father’s restaurant. His apartment was on the floor above his parents, so his mother could nip up and tidy it. Foffo’s father had given him a car, which he crashed while high on alcohol and cocaine.

Prato, who had a degree in political science, was well known on Rome’s gay scene as an organizer of club nights. He liked dressing as a woman and hoped to change gender once he had enough money for surgery. Prato and Foffo had met at a party and occasionally spent time together taking drugs. In the days leading up to the murder they holed up in Foffo’s apartment, plotting money-making schemes and taking huge quantities of cocaine, paid for with the bank card that a wealthy acquaintance had accidentally left behind. Their victim was a man who sometimes sold his body to pay off gambling debts. Varani was offered €150 to come to the flat, then drugged, abused and tortured for hours. Prato instigated the murder plan, but Foffo, fuelled by drugs and paranoia, dealt the fatal blow. He was worried Prato might share a video of them engaged in oral sex during a previous drugs spree, and anxious not to be seen as gay. Varani was stabbed more than 100 times.

Lagioia draws on court records and interviews with the men’s family and friends in an elegant plotting of the events that led up to their fatal encounter. Yet his framing of the case – a cause célèbre in Italy – as emblematic of Roman corruption and chaos isn’t entirely persuasive. The lens in City of the Living rarely widens out sufficiently to show a social context that we might connect to such a violent act. Clearly it is hard to succeed in Rome without the right contacts. Homophobia is common. (Manuel’s father told reporters: “We Foffos don’t like gays, we like real women”.) But Prato and Foffo were from comfortable, indulgent backgrounds. If they were victims, then it was of a culture that allows young people to keep holding their parents responsible well into adulthood. Prato complained that he hadn’t received enough love from his mother, who had to care for another child with muscular dystrophy. Foffo blamed his father for buying him the wrong kind of car, among other failings. This may be less a story of Rome than of contemporary self-absorption and timeless human cruelty. One police officer described the crime as “Frankenstein in the time of the smart phone”.

Nicola Lagioia’s compelling story has been poorly served by its translator. Ann Goldstein, much praised for her English versions of Elena Ferrante’s novels, tends to keep close to the original text, often choosing the closest-sounding word in English, even when it means something slightly different. There is a school of translation that argues against providing too smooth a version in English; there should be enough “friction” that the source language is still felt. A Roman or a Parisian shouldn’t sound like a Londoner, for example. That’s fair enough, but when syntax or turns of phrase are lifted wholesale from the original, it feels as if translation theory is being honoured at the expense of the author. Many sentences in this book are clumsy, and some read as though they were still in Italian. A mother describes her son as “pacific” rather than “calm”. A phrase such as “they were still present to themselves”, to mean (I think) that the men were still aware of what they were doing, needs to be read several times before it’s understood. Some linguistic friction may be a good thing, but it becomes obstruction when the reader has to play the role of interpreter.

Miranda France is a consultant editor at the TLS

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