The City of the Living - by Nicola Lagioia (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A CRIMEREADS AND WORLD LITERATURE TODAY NOTABLE BOOK OF 2023

A spellbinding, best-selling work of true crime about one of the most shocking murders in recent Italian history and set in a Rome that will be a constant revelation to anyone who knows only the city's well-worn tourist paths.

In March 2016, in a nondescript apartment on the outskirts of Rome, Manuel Foffo and Marco Prato, two "ordinary" young men from good families, brutally murdered twenty-three year old Luca Varani. News of the seemingly inexplicable crime sent shockwaves through Rome and beyond. What motivated such extreme violence? Were the killers evil or in the grip of societal evils? Did they know what they were doing? Or were they possessed? And if the latter, possessed by what?

Going beyond anything that has ever been written on the crime, based on months of interviews, court documentation, and correspondence with the killers themselves, The City of the Living not only reads like a fast-paced, revelatory thriller in the style of Lisa Taddeo's Animal but is also a descent into the dark heart of Rome--a city plagued by corruption, drugs, hidden violence that sometimes erupts.

Nicola Lagioia leads us through a maze of betrayed expectations, sexual confusion, inability to grow up, economic grievances, crises of identity--progressively tightening the focus of the analysis to locate the point after which anything is possible. As hypnotic as Erik Larson's Devil in the White City, an heir to Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, The City of the Living is Nicola Lagioia's most gripping, bestselling, and critically acclaimed book to-date, the story not only of a crime but of a society and the human natures that make such a crime possible.

Review Quotes

"This documentary thriller is psychogeography at its most perceptive, an insightful socio-economic analysis of Italy -- and an attempt to understand what human beings are capable of doing to each other and to themselves."--Anna Aslanyan, Financial Times

"I don't think it's possible to praise this book enough."--Molly Odintz, CrimeReads

"Lagioia's literary thriller provides a more complicated picture of crime and punishment than many crime novels, and the vivid depictions of Rome leap from the page."--Jon Jeffryes, Library Journal

"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...Compelling." --Miranda France, Times Literary Supplement

"The City of the Living is fiction at its best--fiction that breathes life into the facts of reality... As only literature can, Lagioia shows us that the fine line that Foffo and Prato walk, surrounded by the great misery and the ever dimmer splendor of Rome--of the entire world--is the same line we all walk every day."--Domenico Starnone, Corriere della Sera

"An absorbing...study of the banality of evil."--Kirkus Reviews

"The City of the Living will keep you up way past bedtime and should be read anytime you have a minute. I won't sell it any further, but to say The City of the Living is a special book for a sophisticated reader."--Durango Telegraph

"The City of the Living is...a portrait of Rome; of its economic divide, its social problems, its social outcasts. Lagioia paints a grim but compelling picture."--The Irish Times

"A gripping thriller that turns into something much more monstrous and shocking by its conclusion...Startling."--Zachary Houle, Medium

"The City of the Living is fiction at its best--fiction that breathes life into the facts of reality... As only literature can, Lagioia shows us that the fine line that Foffo and Prato walk, surrounded by the great misery and the ever dimmer splendor of Rome--of the entire world--is the same line we all walk every day."--Domenico Starnone, Corriere della Sera

"A magnificent panorama of Rome, dark and rotting... Unlike bad journalism, literature knows no monsters, because 'monsters' are comforting, something we humans can never become. Instead, the world of Lagioia's book is deeply human: a world where parents don't know their children, where fresh young love is based on a lie, where dark passions unfold with cold, geometric precision. That world is our world."--Walter Siti, Domani

"Reading some books can be an experience as extreme as the story they tell... This is the case with Nicola Lagioia's The City of the Living, a journey into the horrific murder of Luca Varani and into the decadence of Rome, a 'dead city, inhabited by the living.' A city from which Lagioia is on the run--psychological and emotionally as well as literally... The book turns into a painful therapy session--for the author and for each of us."--la Repubblica

"Before I started reading, I wondered how Lagioia would be able to tell such a terrible, ambiguous, twisted story without being crushed by the weight of moral responsibility. The degree of the suffering inflicted on Luca Varani is almost impossible to imagine. How to write anything other than a long condemnation of his killers? It was a difficult task, but Lagioia succeeded. He found the words to tell the darkest of stories, and allowed us to enter into the minds of the killers. Not in order to forgive them--that's not up to us--but to finally be able to see them."--Antonella Lattanzi, La Stampa