Hear nothing, see nothing, say nothing: those three things will keep you alive. That is the code of Italy’s most violence Mafia: the Camorra. And this is where it’s gripped the strongest – Naples. A city in the heart of Europe. It’s brutality is notorious. It’s killed more people than the IRA. Mark Franchetti, Italy’s Bloodiest Mafia, BBC 2011
There’s another side to the city if you know where to look. The grim estates of north Naples. With addicts openly shooting up after buying heroin from the Camorra. ibid.
Neapolitans don’t call it the Camorra. They call it Itsistema – the System. The System isn’t one organisation with a single godfather like Sicily’s Cosa Nostra. It’s a system of competing, often warring, criminal clans who can strike anyone at any time. ibid.
The Camorra has been a blight on Naples for more than a century ... It wasn’t until it started dealing in illegal drugs that it became truly rich. ibid.
The Camorra has raked in millions dumping toxic waste on this land. ibid.
The Mafia is glamorised, and I refuse to do that. Andrew Camilleri
There’s a dark heart to this tourist dream. Italy is also a society of organised crime, corruption and unsolved murders. Out of this chilling reality a new wave of crime fiction has emerged. With its own twist on the redemptions of the detective novel ... A noir world with no happy endings. Timeshift: Italian Noir: The Story of Italian Crime Fiction, BBC 2010
The detective novels of Andrea Camilleri are set in contemporary Sicily. They deal with the casebook of the worldly Inspector Montalbano of the local police force. ibid.
In That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana Carlo Emilio Gadda employed a crime story to explore Italy’s fascist era. ibid.
Into the 1960s Leonardo Sciascia’s novels would expose the power of the Sicilian Mafia. ibid.
This neo-fascist bombing began a decade of terror. ibid.
In 1978 the kidnapping and murder of former prime minister Aldo Moro troubled Italians. ibid.
The Goodbye Kiss is filmed as a modern-day noir. ibid.
Giancarlo de Cataldo: Romanzo Criminale. ibid.
There’s a new front line in the war against organised crime: in southern Italy’s rugged highlands a previously unknown criminal group meets ... Europe’s biggest cocaine traffickers. John Dickie, This World: The Mafia’s Secret Bunkers, BBC 2013
Forcing Mafiosi underground into bizarre and sophisticated bunkers. From here the run their criminal empires. ibid.
Calabrian 'Ndrangheta: building this subterranean labyrinth was a major enterprise. ibid.
A secret society of criminals: kidnapping for ransom ... often for years. ibid.
Cosa Nostra works like a shadow state using extortion as its tax. ibid.
A global Mafia federation with an annual turnover estimated at forty-four billion Euros. ibid.
Calabria’s institutions have been profoundly infiltrated. ibid.
The gangstas hold the real power in the region. ibid.
I’m in Naples. Southern Italy. A city under the control of the Camorra, one of the oldest, most powerful gangs in the world ... The Camorra is old-school Mafia. Inside the Gangsters’ Code: Naples, Discovery 2013
The Camorra, the most brutal, are strangling the life out of Naples. ibid.
It’s a loose conglomerate of guys running wild. ibid.
The new Camorra knows no boundaries. ibid.
I’ll tell you what it is – anti-Italian discrimination. The Sopranos s4e3: Christopher, starring James Gandolfini & Lorriane Bracco & Edie Falco & Michael Imperioli & Dominic Chianese & Steven van Zandt & Tony Sirico & Robert Iler et al, Sylvio at table in street, HBO 2002
The north of Italy always had the money and the power ... I hate the north. ibid. Furio
Mussolini was Hitler’s bitch. ibid. female protester
They discriminate against all Italians as a group. ibid.
The Italian State is diseased. The Bolshevik cancer has started to corrode it. We have to amputate before the infection spreads. And to do this, we have to pool our strength. Romanzo Criminale s1e9 starring Francesco Montanari & Vinicio Marchioni & Alessandro Roja & Marco Bocci & Daniela Virgilio & Andrea Sartoretti et al, professor fascist
There has been an explosion at Bologna Station. Romanzo Criminale s1e11 starring Francesco Montanari & Vinicio Marchioni & Alessandro Roja & Marco Bocci & Daniela Virgilio & Andrea Sartoretti et al, radio news, Sky Cinema 2008
This bomb business means trouble. Even more than the Moro kidnapping. ibid. Freddo
In defiance of popular feeling Riina escalated his campaign against the State in the autumn of 1992 by resorting to terrorism, extending Mafia violence to the Italian mainland. Mafia Empire - Vendetta
On the island of Sicily beauty and brutality have lived side by side for thousands of years. It was here in a world of shadows and secrets that the Mafia was born. Through terror and murder a small minority of men held Sicily in their grip. Eventually their influence reached all the way to the highest levels of Italian government and beyond. Organised Crime – A World History: Sicily, History 2002
There’s a war on the mainland. Terrorists are killing cops, judges, journalists, they even killed Moro. Corleone VII starring Caludio Gioe & Daniele Liotti & Simona Cavallari & Marco Leonardi & Salvatore Lazzaro & Marco Leonardi & Alfredo Pea et al, rozzer to missus
We’re waging war against the Italian state. Corleone IX starring Caludio Gioe & Daniele Liotti & Simona Cavallari & Marco Leonardi & Salvatore Lazzaro & Marco Leonardi & Alfredo Pea et al, Riina
Italy initially declared neutrality. The First World War: Shackled to a Corpse, Channel 4 2003
If the leading player on the stage of Europe was Hitler, the supporting character was Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. The Italian fascists came to power many years before the German Nazis for reasons much the same. World War II: The Complete History, Discovery 2000
Mussolini was proclaimed the King of Italy, the new Emperor of Abyssinia. ibid
He [Mussolini] was captured and shot. His body with that of his mistress were hung from a lamp-post in a Milan street. World War II: The Complete History: Unconditional Surrender
Like some latter-day Roman consul Mussolini longed for an African empire. The World at War 8/26: Desert, ITV 1973
200,000 Italians were taken prisoner. ibid.
Only two months after the German collapse in Tunisia, the British and Americans began landing troops on Sicilian beaches. The World at War 13/26: Tough Old Gut
It was not the sunny Italy of the travel posters. ibid.
Those Romans who had backed the wrong side now paid the price. ibid.
On September 13th 1940 an Italian army of 80,000 men marched out of Libya and into Egypt to threaten the epicentre of the British Empire. Jonathan Dimbleby, Churchill’s Desert War: The Road to Alamein, BBC 2012
In the space of a month the British had taken 130,000 Italian prisoners. ibid.