Book Review: “The City of the Living” by Nicola Lagioia

When you think of Rome, Italy, you might think of the city as a bit of a tourist trap: a place to visit the ancient Coliseum or see some statues of Michelangelo. In Nicola Lagionia’s hands, however, this version of the city is turned upside down. His latest work — a book of creative non-fiction titled The City of the Living — opens with the image of rats descending upon the 2,700-year-old burg. And with good reason. This is an account, told in novelistic form, of a horrible murder that plagued the city in March 2016. Two men on the verge of being thirty, Manuel Foffo and Marco Prato brutally tortured and killed a younger man named Luca Varani. The most shocking thing about the murder, though, was that it appeared to have absolutely zero motive behind it. The pair lured Varani to Foffo’s apartment with the intent of raping the man — Foffo was a heterosexual, but Prato was a gay man with a penchant for dressing up as a woman — and were high on a combination of cocaine and vodka. The murder, as it happened, came from out of seemingly nowhere. To this point, Lagiolia’s work — if it could be called a “novel” because its structure rivals that narrative tradition — tries to show, in part, how the two men who became killers could be considered guilty of the crime if they were simply evil enough to have no premeditation for the act they committed. <a href="https://zachary-houle.medium.com/book-review-the-city-of-the-living-by-nicola-lagioia-fcfac75e16d6">Website</a>