With another “Gomorrah” spinoff being filmed, some Neapolitans say they’re fed up with all the shows portraying the “malavita,” or the lawless life. “Why must only bad things be said about us?”
A banner fluttered in March over a narrow alley in Naples crammed with tourist shops selling Nativity figurines. Naples, it proclaimed, “doesn’t support you anymore.”
The “you” is the wildly successful Italian television crime drama “Gomorrah,” which days earlier had begun filming a prequel — “Gomorrah: Origins” — in the city’s gritty Spanish Quarter, tracing the 1970s roots of the show’s leading Camorra crime syndicate clan.
Perhaps no modern pop culture reference has clung more stubbornly to Naples, Italy’s third-largest city, than “Gomorrah,” the title of Roberto Saviano’s 2006 nonfiction best seller about the Neapolitan mafia. A critically acclaimed movie followed in 2008, and the TV series premiered in 2014 and ran for five seasons. Two more movies debuted in 2019: “The Immortal,” a spinoff, and “Piranhas,” based on a Saviano novel about crime bosses as young as 15. And now there’s “Origins.”
So excuse some Neapolitans if they say they’ve had enough.
“They filmed the first one, they filmed the second one,” said Gennaro Di Virgilio, the fourth-generation owner of an artisanal Nativity shop. “Basta.”
Once too dangerous and corrupt to attract many foreigners, Naples has been in the thrall of a tourism boom for years. Social media has lured visitors to the city’s history, food and sunshine, helping Naples shake off some of its seedy reputation, though youth unemployment and crime remain stubbornly high.
But the city keeps getting typecast, some Neapolitans say, as Gomorrah, reducing its residents to those engaged in the “malavita,” the lawless life.
