CLAUDIO MENNA
CLAUDIO MENNA
CLAUDIO MENNA
"LOBOS"
In the last years beheading of several criminal families related to Camorra System brought kids – as sons or grandchildren – taking power to control their business. Hungry to show their value and potential they created small and big group of "soldiers" known by media as "Baby gangs". With no rules and no mercy they always move in packs, often they rob and attack with the only sadistic taste to do it. In the last years in Naples there have been dozens of attacks against teenagers with a ferociy and brutality too similar to that of Roberto Saviano’s TV show “Gomorra”. First of them were sons - or related - to criminal leaders detained for life sentences or decades in prison; in a short while their attitude made a strange trend where kids and teens from difficult areas of the city turned themselves in baby gangsters following those behaviors of violence and anger, although they did not belong to criminal traditions.
On september 2015 during a "stesa" - a criminal attack made by young members of baby gangs which shoot with automatic weapons on air, forcing people to throw spread on ground (litterally "stesi al suolo") the young Gennaro Cesarano - a 16 yo teen from Rione Sanità - was accidentally killed. His death brought between the youngest of neighborhood, his closed friends, a wave of haterd difficult to be curbed. Associations, Ngo's and volunteers started an hard work to avoid a new kind of war, different from those made by Camorra leaders in '80s. A war without any kind of rules, and ethical limits.
Rione Sanità is a popular and historical district of Naples located inside the city belly, known by most for the every day news about criminal organizations, drugs dealing, murders and baby gangs, as almost every popular districts in Naples. Despite its recent emancipation where cultural aggregation points and associations are working hard to take away kids from streets and from a marked path, it’s always an unresolved issue. Total absence of government’s authorities creates for decades inside “Rione Sanità” a parallel world where survival entrusted to common sense often trampled by crime and their way to promise easy money for all neighborhood’s kids, for them indispensable as dealers or sentinels.
After the tv show “Gomorra”, crime and criminals have been projected in common imaginary as “Guest Stars”, stereotypes and model to follow for all those kids without any family support.
"Lobos" is a report started several years ago about last generation of kids and teens born after 2000's inside Rione Sanità, my mother's neighborhood; the main actors of this story are all connected directly or indirectly to what happened few years ago to Gennaro Cesarano, a 16yo teen accidentally mourdered during a criminal attack made by teens of a rival district.
"Lobos" is an anthropological report about the main cause which lead youngest who live in a popular neighborhood as Rione Sanità to take criminal paths. I tried to investigate - diving myself in this reality - how the absence of Government and Municipality affect their lives, made mostly, by family issues, school dropout, bad habits, traditions, religion and paganism, fake myths, smoke sellers and dealers of illusions. (Photo and text © Claudio Menna)
From Invisible Cities of Italo Calvino:
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
CLAUDIO MENNA
When a handful of youngsters asked to Father Antonio Loffredo to help them staying far from streets - places of easy temptations - he immediately sought a solution. The boys proposed the idea. Every neighborhood has a popular gym, why Rione Sanità doesn't? Antonio works in Rione Sanità - one of the most popular, feared and discussed neighborhood located in the belly of Naples - almost for 2 decades, and during his term of office as priest he practically concentrated all his energy to help kids and teens with family issues, absent parents and similar problems with the target to give them a new path, a purpose, a job. in Rione Sanità live about 30.000 people, most of them are over 40 years old, and the greatest part of the youngest don't complete school. In south Italy and expecially in Naples there's the highest unemployment rate in the country. Politicians on duty use neighborhoods like Rione Sanità as field of votes, promising the non-existent and impossible cooperating with the local underworld. Despite criminal activities are almost the same in the city - cradle of the so-called Camorra - inside Rione Sanità Father Antonio started a silent revolution focused to remove young workers to criminal business. He created "Sanitansamble" a sinphonical Orchestra with dozens of street kids almost ten years ago, and now they are all professional musicians. He has given birth to a cultural renaissance of the neighborhood where the youngest have become guides, translators, hoteliers, managers of tourist facilities, entrepreneurs of themselves. Now Rione Sanità with the aid of Institutions, the Mayor Luigi de Magistris and several ong's, seems to be really a different place. Inside this story is born RS/Boxe, a popular boxing school, located inside an old church and ruled by two police men, Olympic and International Champions, whose role is to involve as many kids as possible in the boxing disciplice, teaching them what rules, sacrifice, pain, satisfactions, victories are. For now, without a real structure, father Antonio hosts the boxing gym inside "Santa Maria della Sanità" sacristy. Teens are happy to take part in this project, dreaming to became real champions as their masters, and maybe who knows, one day best of them really will say he started to train inside an old Church inside his neighborhood, thanks to Davide, Enzo, Marco who proposed this crazy idea to a brillant crazy priest.
Text and photos © Claudio Menna