Rome's Criminal Saga Reaches the Opera Stage

The New York Times reported this week that 'Romanzo Criminale', the bestselling Italian crime novel, has been turned into an opera — a third life for a story that was already a hit film and a still bigger television series. The paper's assessment of the franchise's hold is blunt: Italians, it says, cannot get enough of it.

The book, by the Rome magistrate Giancarlo De Cataldo, appeared in the early 2000s and became a bestseller. The saga follows a criminal syndicate rooted in the capital's periphery, and it draws on the years when the city's underworld, its political violence and its financial scandals became hard to separate in the public account. That period has been documented at length in English-language writing on Italy, which is part of the reason the book travelled.

The adaptation record is itself the story. The film compressed the narrative into a single arc; the television version, which the Times calls the bigger hit, had room to stretch across the institutions the book implicates. Opera imposes a different economy of plot — the form has always preferred betrayal to procedure, and it compresses decades into a few hours of song.