The northern Neapolitan suburb of Scampia is notorious for its drug wars, clan battles and ever-growing casualty list. But the long-suffering area was at the centre of a rather different kind of conflict at the weekend after a war of words erupted between its local politicians and Italy's most prominent anti-mafia campaigner over the filming of a follow-up television series to the 2008 hit film Gomorrah.
In what he said was an attempt to protect the area and its inhabitants from disproportionately bad publicity, Scampia's local council chief, Angelo Pisani, will not allow cameras into the neighbourhood for the making of the upcoming drama, which is to be called Gomorrah after Roberto Saviano's chilling exposé of the Neapolitan underworld, which in turn spawned Matteo Garrone's film.
"It is time to say enough of the exploitative use of Naples and this area in particular," Pisani told the Corriere del Mezzogiorno. "The constant exaggeration – only of the negative things, which exist, it cannot be denied – solves nothing; on the contrary, it worsens the problems and confirms the stigma."
The mayor of Naples, Luigi de Magistris, said that while he played no part in Pisani's decision, he supported it. "We are tired of seeing Scampia reduced … to a place of conquest for the warring Camorra, as if nothing else existed in Scampia beyond the drug-pushing and the feuding clans," he said, likening the Gomorrah effect on the local area to a "negative media brand" that he claimed had left locals "exasperated".
To Saviano, however, the Naples-born writer and scourge of the Camorra, this smacked of little more than "pure, sly censorship" aimed at deflecting attention from the problems of Scampia and politicians' inability to solve them.
"How can you want to block the recounting of the contradictions of a place which, actually, should be at the forefront of national interest every day?" he wrote in a savage column for La Repubblica. Saviano, who has played a supervisory role in the 12-part series, accused local politicians of "shifting attention from the problem to the recounting of the problem". He added: "When nothing changes because of incompetent management, it is better [for politicians] that the organs of the press, writers' pens and directors' TV cameras remain silent, switched off, idle and still."
Filming for the television series, the work of production companies Fandango and Cattleya for Sky Italia, is set to begin within weeks. A spokesman for Catteleya said he was surprised by the decision, particularly as only a small amount of the series was to be set in Scampia.
Saviano's book, published in 2006, and Garrone's subsequent film, were credited with exposing the work of the powerful Neapolitan mafia to the world.
But Scampia, scene of continuing bloody turf wars between rival Camorra factions over multimillion-pound drug markets, remains deeply troubled. Last week, one of the area's most notorious fugitives, Antonio Mennetta, 28, was arrested in a villa near Salerno. On the run from murder and criminal conspiracy charges since September, he was described by police as the head of the powerful Girati clan of Scampia.
