Left to right: Michael Jacob, Grazia Verasani, Giampiero Rigosi, Marina Dal Bon (organizer), Giovanna Zucconi, Daniela De Gregorio, and the brain behind the event, Andrea Cernicchi. (Massimo Carlotto arrived late!)Nero Perugino is the world’s finest chocolate, at least according to residents of Perugia, Italy. But that Nestlè brand name took on a dark new flavor when Nero Perugino (Futura), a collection of four commissioned short stories, was published recently. The authors whose work was included--Massimo Carlotto, Giampiero Rigosi, Grazia Verasani, and your humble correspondents, writing as “Michael Gregorio”--appeared on stage in Perugia to talk about our contributions on December 12 at the Teatro Pavone.
To everyone’s surprise, an audience of about 450 people turned up. Then again, given the theme of this anthology, the size of the audience should have surprised no one. The crime writers had been invited to contribute a short story focusing on the “dark side” of this bustling city. The idea was the brainchild of Andrea Cernicchi, the counselor for culture in Perugia. Any customer who buys a book in one of the city’s bookshops in the run-up to Christmas, he declared, will receive a free copy of Nero Perugino at the city’s expense. And counselor Cernicchi has 15,000 copies to give away.
Giovanna Zucconi, a well-known Italian journalist, was in the moderator’s chair, and she set the tone for the evening by referring immediately to the tragic event which splashed the name of Perugia on the front pages of the world’s newspaper just over a year ago: the murder of Meredith Kercher, an English girl who had been studying in Perugia. The trial of Amanda Knox, Raffaele Sollecito, and Rudi Guede, who are accused of killing Kercher, has become a national and international obsession. The streets of once-tranquil, provincial Perugia have been overrun with journalists and cameramen desperately looking for new angles, and the name of the city has become synonymous with drugs, sex, and violence.
The reaction of city fathers was to play the story down and wait for the storm to blow over. With one exception--Andrea Cernicchi.
Cernicchi reckoned that the city had to face up to the fact that a foreign student had been murdered here, and that other students in cosmopolitan Perugia--an African, an American, and an Italian--had reportedly been involved in her slaying. The city’s two universities host about 20,000 students a year, and a great number of them are foreigners. It was risky, the counselor said, to leave the city’s image in the hands of bored foreign journalists who were digging up all sorts of dirt while waiting for the trial to get under way, then run its course. If Perugia really did have a problem, the best way to deal with it was to bring it out into the open, invite the inhabitants to think about the situation, then talk it through. After some hard thinking with his team of advisers, he came up with Nero Perugino, four abbreviated tales to be set in Perugia and written by professional crime writers. As Daniela De Gregorio (half of the writing team of “Michael Gregorio”) put it: “We were invited to try and exorcise evil from the city.”
The authors were asked to spend a couple of days in the city, explore it freely, then produce a short story that had been inspired by their visit. The results are eloquent proof of the rich variety of the human imagination. Each writer came to Perugia, saw what he or she wanted, or managed, to see of the city, and then wrote whatever came most naturally.
Massimo Carlotto, one of the great names in modern Italian crime writing, produced “Cortonese Station,” a characteristically sardonic tale of a Russian hit man who comes to Perugia to do a job, gets caught up in the journalistic hullabaloo, and reluctantly sees the error of his ways. As Carlotto said to wild public applause: “I came expecting the worst, and I found Perugia to be a very nice place. Despite what the papers say, nothing has changed. The young are as vibrant as ever.”
My wife and I decided that our early 19th-century Prussian magistrate, Hanno Stiffeniis (Days of Atonement) should visit Perugia during his 1792 grand tour. In our story “Die Wanderung,” Hanno falls in love with the artistic masterpieces and the brilliant Italian sunlight. Predictably, he goes off wandering at night, and gets himself into trouble. “As young people tend to do,” I remarked to the audience. “As I certainly did when I was a student.” In our story, wine and the Sublime are a more than adequate substitute for beer and marijuana.
Giampiero Rigosi took a more direct approach, rewriting the murder of Meredith Kercher in a startling way. The central character in his tale, “La Notte di Halloween” (the Kercher murder occurred on the night of November 1, 2007), is a costumed Templar who sets out to save the intended victim by slaughtering the three aggressors in his own spectacular manner.
“Murder is always polyglot,” Grazia Verasani wrote in oblique reference to the nationalities of the students involved in Meredith Kercher’s murder. “My effort is not a story, it’s just a chronicle of my stay,” she told the theater audience, explaining the genesis of her contribution. She offers the reader an edited version of her notes as she visited Perugia for the first time in her life, noticing all the things which make the city so memorable--fine art, fine food, and magnificent buildings, plus a rich mingling of cultures and breathtaking views of the nearby mountains. And, most of all, the wind--the so-called tramontana, which blows down from the mountains through the historic streets of Perugia. “Is the gale that shrieks down from Porta Sole the only menacing thing about this city?” she asks.
Afterward, as we chatted with members of the audience in the cathedral square and signed copies of Nero Perugino, the general consensus was that the wind could be cold, very, very cold. “Murderously cold,” as someone remarked, appropriately.
Nero Perugino contains a preface by Giovanna Zucconi, and an introduction by Maurizio Pistelli, who teaches Contemporary Italian Literature in Perugia and is the author of Un secolo in giallo: Storia del poliziesco italiano (1861-1960), which translates as A Century of Crime Writing in Italy.
Although this anthology is not available commercially outside of Italy, we have obtained a dozen copies and would be happy to send one--free of charge--to anyone who e-mails their request here. Remember, though, that Nero Perugino is written in Italian.
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