The Roberto Saviano Case: A Crash Course on Debates Around Defamation in Italy

The 44-year-old Italian writer and commentator Roberto Saviano is used to having powerful enemies. Over the course of a career spent exposing organized crime and its links to the state and the legitimate economy, Saviano has brought resistance to the Camorra and other Italian criminal enterprises into mainstream discourse. The success of Saviano’s 2006 exposé Gomorrah shattered what was left of Italian society’s complicity toward omertá, the code of silence that largely succeeded