The genesis, rise and decline of a business that seems to have disappeared but instead is still very active today: cigarette smuggling. Through what was once considered one of the most classic occupations of the underclass, Leogrande investigates the transformation of the Sacra corona unita, the universe of the hulls and its men, and that tangle of companies that, by controlling, representing or mediating with other businesses, mingled with crime. Going so far as to cross the borders of the Adriatic and outline the dynamics of a global traffic in which not only Eastern and domestic mafias play a role, but also multinationals. “Smuggling is always a product of contemporary society, and like it, it knows how to constantly renew itself. For this reason, questioning its near past, the forms it has taken and the way they have crossed Italy and the Mezzogiorno, is important. It is the first weapon we have to understand the way traffickers act. Their metamorphoses, their ability to penetrate the economy, finance, politics.” A narratively paced reportage that, with great clarity, not only talks about smugglers but gives us a narrative of our country and its recent metamorphoses.

Alessandro Leogrande was a great intellectual of our time. He wrote to fight against borders and shipwrecks, caporalato and ignorance, bad faith and injustice. This volume collects all the work he dedicated to Taranto, his city. A perfect city, as Pasolini called it in 1959. New Taranto, old Taranto and around the two seas.
“The steel center cost almost four hundred billion lire. It ended up occupying first 600 and then 1,500 hectares, an area twice the size of the entire city. From then on it was the city that grew and shaped itself around the factory. It was the times and rhythms of the factory that marked the times and rhythms of the urban fabric.” A city that today is also the dormitory of Ilva workers, the cathedral in the desert that makes its workers the guinea pigs of new labor relations, in which the social divide is widening, while rights are increasingly difficult to defend.
“Whether the factory remains in place or is closed down,” Leogrande wrote, “whether it is sold off to an Italian string of companies or to some rising Asian multinational, Taranto must still get out of the ‘steel monoculture’ that has done nothing but feed from its own bowels over the past half century.”
“Only the telling of the margins and fragments makes it possible to open a rift and understand something. To understand how old things and new things intersect with each other.”

There is an imaginary yet very real line, a wound that is not closed, a place of everyone and no one of which everyone, invisibly, is a part: it is the frontier that separates and at the same time unites the North of the world, democratic, liberal and civilized, and the South, poor, war-bitten, backward and undemocratic. It is on the edge of this frontier that the Great Game of the contemporary world is played out. This threshold is elusive, indefinable, non-material: the writing approaches it by approximations, attempts, moving into the unexplored, there where migrations and rejections are consumed, there where people fight to live or to die. Leogrande takes us aboard the ships of Operation Mare Nostrum and fishes the words from the seabed where they lie embedded and hidden. He takes us to meet traffickers and baby-scouts, along with the stories of the survivors of the Mediterranean shipwrecks off Lampedusa; he reconstructs the story of the Eritreans, a people among the peoples forced into migration by a vicious dictatorship, also caused by Italian colonialism; he tells us about the other frontier, the Greek frontier, that of Golden Dawn and Patras, and then the other one again, that of the Balkans; he introduces us to an exploded and devastated Libya; he lets us into the Italian CIEs and their abuses, into the violence of the Roman suburbs and the violence hidden in our souls: this is how the unnamable black hole into which EU law and our consciences sink every day is given a word. So much suffering. How much chaos. How much indifference. Somewhere in the future, our descendants will wonder how we could let this happen.
That word points to a line miles long and years thick. A furrow that crosses matter and time, nights and days, generations and the very voices that talk about it, chase each other, overlap, contradict each other, compress, expand.
It is the frontier.

Helena Janeczek, Carlo Lucarelli, Vanni Santoni, Alessandro Leogrande, Diego De Silva, Gioacchino Criaco and Evelina Santangelo. Seven authors, each with their own story, their own sensibility and their own voice, re-actualize with as many unpublished stories, written specifically for L’agenda ritrovata, the core of Paolo Borsellino’s commitment and the questions still open twenty-five years after the Via D’Amelio massacre – the denied truth, the need for justice, the misappropriation, the failure to find it, the resistance of politics… They succeed without the need for the chronicling of facts: they succeed by inventing stories. “A writer who does his duty,” Marco Balzano points out in the introduction, “is first and foremost a writer who writes well and knows how to deliver a story to others. We wanted a book that was alive, completely cast in the present day, without further mythologizing, without further hypocritical sanctification, which only served to place in an inaccessible Olympus those who belonged to the community and only for it sacrificed themselves. Literature, on the other hand, when it is literature, always performs an operation of rapprochement.”
A rapprochement that is also a journey from North to South – Helena Janeczek (Lombardy), Carlo Lucarelli (Emilia-Romagna), Vanni Santoni (Tuscany), Alessandro Leogrande (Lazio), Diego De Silva (Campania), Gioacchino Criaco (Calabria) and Evelina Santangelo (Sicily) -, “a passing of the baton,” writes Gianni Biondillo recalling how the book was born, “to tell not so much where we were at the death of the two magistrates, but where perhaps we have been in these years, all of us: Those who were silent, those who were indifferent, those who were disappointed, those who were cowardly, those who were always, stubbornly opposed, in the front row.”
A resistant thread binds the stories in this anthology to each other: a red agenda. It appears from the page declined in different ways, once it has torn sheets, another is swollen with theater tickets, but always meant to recall the one that belonged to Paolo Borsellino-which contained notes, names and perhaps revelations about the Capaci massacre, disappeared immediately after the July 19, 1992 Mafia attack and never reappeared.
“The finding of the red agenda metaphorically is the recovery of a form of dignity, of a sense of things finally unraveling, of an awareness that another world, another life is more possible than ever.”

The South, and in particular Capitanata, has for several years become a destination for tens of thousands of immigrants who flock there for the tomato picking season. Harvesting the “red gold” is extremely hard work that breaks their backs and arms, but they are paid very little. They are workers framed in even pre-capitalist living and working situations: housed in dilapidated ruins, they are also subjected to the often sadistic harassment of “corporals,” who offer their labor to a corporate world that uses them to squeeze costs. Sometimes, these new “boors,” so different from the “boors” of yesterday, also find it difficult to get paid what little was agreed upon. And protests not infrequently result in death. A barbaric situation that scourges like a social cancer vast areas of Italy, where the rule of law seems to be totally absent, and where the only law of the exercise of brute violence applies. This novel-investigation, a true journey to the underworld, reveals the lives, personal destinies and deepest dynamics of the “blackest” face of our country.