Dalla città-centro alla città-periferia. Giancarlo De Cataldo e la narrazione dei margini

Abstract

The contribution investigates the changing dichotomy centre-periphery of the city of Rome through a rereading of Giancarlo De Cataldo’s fiction. The narrative of urban space in Romanzo criminale (2002), Suburra (2013) and La Svedese (2022) offers a crime reinterpretation of the Roman periphery from the late 1970s to the second decade of the 2000s. The author explores the complexities and ambiguities of living on the margins of the cultural context of reference, where the same condition of marginality is not the exclusive prerogative of the built-up areas near the ring roads, inhabited by a large part of the population for some time. The road infrastructure system, although in the common imagination it refers to the idea of transit and extremity, innervates the urban fabric, dialoguing with the more distant monumental city and becoming an identity zone with its own narrative to legitimise. The study intends to highlight how De Cataldo’s narrative work was able to represent the changing concept of suburbia and the different perception of territorial and moral degradation.