Naples 1343: The Unexpected Origins of the Mafia

The choice to go to graduate school may be motivated by many factors. For historian Feniello (medieval history, Univ. of L’Aquila), it was a journey to find the roots of violence in his Neapolitan community, a place where gang wars closed the school where he was a teacher, and murders were left purposely unsolved by the police. This quest led him back to the 14th century for this book, his first to be translated into English. From the sparsest of historical documents, his book unravels not just a particular crime but a culture. The text has a fascinating meta quality; it’s as much about the process of reconstructing a nearly 700-year-old event as the event itself. Starting with a few scant paragraphs written over centuries documenting a 1343 attack on a cargo ship, the book delves deep into the archives to reconstruct everything from the political climate of the era to the weather conditions and the failed harvest that made for desperate times. Then it takes readers back to the present.