Napoli every after

With its decaying beauty and unique way of life inspiring books, films, TV and music, the Italian, city has captured the cultural zeitgeist

- Tobias Jones

It's sometimes the fate of a single city to epitomise an era: Berlin in the 1920s, perhaps, or London in the 1960s. So which one would represent our own period of ecological anxiety, true crime and fake news? I'd wager it's one you might not suspect: Naples. In terms of cultural clout, the place is booming. The city's famous bay, flanked by Mount Vesuvius, is on every TV schedule and streaming platform: from Paolo Sorrentino's The Hand of God, an autobiographical movie about parental loss, to Ultras, which documents the warring factions of a Neapolitan hooligan crew, via Mare Fuori (The Sea Beyond - RAI's cult TV series about a youth detention centre in the city) and Mixed by Erry, this year's Netflix hit about music bootleggers in the 1980s.

In May, Napoli even won the scudetto, the Serie A football championship, for the first time since 1990. The fact that their leading striker, Victor Osimhen, wore a black face mask and had a Neapolitan sun peroxided into his hair only made the story more enticing.

Naples's return to global notoriety is largely down to Roberto Saviano. His docu-novel, Gomorrah, gave rise to an eponymous film by Matteo Garrone, a five-season series running from 2014 to 2021 and a "mid-quel" film, L'Immortale. Saviano has made the most of his success. Living under armed guard, he has been a vocal opponent of the city's mafia, the Camorra, and is rarely off Italy's front pages as he takes principled stands on criminality, fascism and corruption. Other novels, La Paranza dei Bambini and ZeroZeroZero, have been turned into a film (released as Piranhas in English) and an eight-part series respectively.