On a plane there is a small suitcase full of papers, carried by a man, austere, well dressed, in the pose of a business traveller. In the hours spent on the seat he writes and rewrites, endlessly filling sheets and pieces of paper with ink. Mile after mile, route after route, he finds it increasingly difficult to put them in the pockets of his suitcase, soon they won’t fit anymore. He could be a spy, a secret agent taking notes on his new objectives, his next moves, his lucid calculations. Or he’s a business consultant who fantasizes about plots and characters around the worlds he sees out the window. Just like that, in fact, a trilogy of over twenty thousand pages was born. Roberto Costantini, engineer and business consultant, now manager at Luiss Guido Carli, just like that he became a writer. That travel suitcase of his already hosted the adventures of Michele Balistreri, protagonist of his first novel You are evilwhich was followed by two more The roots of evil And Evil does not forget.
Guest of the Nero di Seppia & Giallo Limoncello review, a series of literary dinners created by the journalist and writer Federica Fantozzi together with the liquorista Micaela Pallini in the historic Carla Trimani wine shop in Rome, the author presented another book, Ashes to ashes, which features another character. Here the protagonist is truly a spy, with a double life, that of Aba Abate, a ministerial employee, and that of Ice, a secret agent. A bit like Roberto Costantini, who within himself has the soul of an engineer, a consultant, a father, a writer and a devourer of detective stories. “As a child I read a lot of detective stories, at sixteen I had already read all of Agatha Christie’s works”.
The event of the review with Roberto Costantini
From You Are Evil to Ashes to Ashes
The protagonist of the evil trilogy, says Costantini, “is a character written with provocative intent”. Born in Libya in the 1950s – like his author, born in Tripoli – with a violent adolescence, he arrives in Italy and makes a career in the police. Male chauvinist, a past in the Ordine Nuovo movement and far-right ideas. “An anti-character compared to the standard, especially of the Italian public,” he explains, adding that a fiction taken from You are evil it would be impossible for these reasons. “In Hollywood, however, HBO responded positively, except that they wanted an American protagonist and I couldn’t change Michele Balistreri and even less everything else, such as the relations between Italy and Libya”.
Aba, on the other hand, is a mother of a family and a spy, as in the series The Americans. “For many years as a secret agent you have been behind a computer analyzing data, suddenly you have to go into the field, this will cause a series of particular events.” Aba Abate is very different from Costantini’s first character. She has a meek, non-curious, calm husband and two children “in the phase that has just ended of the 15-18 war”, an expression which in the novel indicates the typical conflictual parent-child relationship. So much so that “twenty years as a spy are not worth as much as being the mother of two teenagers”. For this cycle of books, Costantini announces, “Cattleya has just acquired the rights so it will probably be done sooner or later”. A character, the antipodes of the first, “certainly much more digestible for Italian television”.
Spy profession
Briefcase, hat, dark glasses, tachycardia, trains and planes. The secret agent also has a prototype. And every country has its own. Costantini thinks that there is a disparity in treatment between how secret agents are treated in Italian novels and how they are treated elsewhere. “As if we were much more capable of devaluing what we have. In the early 2000s we had two of the largest mobile telephone companies in Europe, Tim and Omnitel, now none. It’s the same with James Bond. Sure, we’re all passionate about it but it’s a comic. Indeed, those who are informed know that the English secret services are among the worst. Yet, they have 007.” The Italian secret services, on the other hand, “have often been diverted”, but it is clear that for Costantini to limit himself to this description is ungenerous. “Let’s say not well represented.”
Moving from writing a character involved in the police to one involved in the secret services, Costantini also noticed a fundamental difference between the two types of authority. “While the successes of the police and carabinieri can be celebrated, this is not the case for the services. Only failures can be celebrated. But in reality their work, secret, in silence, in the shadows, is fundamental to protecting the interests of our country.”
