'Romanzo Criminale' Reaches the Opera Stage, and Italy Keeps Buying In

The New York Times reported on Friday that "Romanzo Criminale", a best-selling Italian crime novel, has been turned into an opera, after a hit film and, in the paper's words, a bigger hit television series. Its assessment of the audience was blunt: Italians, it wrote, cannot get enough of the story.

The novel is generally described as a fictionalised chronicle of a Rome criminal gang across the 1970s and 1980s, a stretch of the capital's history that Italian fiction and television have returned to many times. Its path — page, cinema, television, lyric stage — is unusual chiefly in the last step, which few crime stories take.

Opera houses have always taken their plots from popular narrative. What is less common is for the source to be a contemporary gangland saga rather than a play, a classical myth or a historical novel, and it is that substitution the Times treats as the news.