Italians watch pain the way one observes a car accident, slowing down just enough to verify whether there are bodies sprawled on the asphalt, whether the blood has already coagulated or still flows fresh and promising along the metal guardrail reflecting the afternoon sun, and then they drive off convinced they’ve participated in something important, that they’ve earned a place in the chronicle simply by having passed by at that precise moment, casual witnesses to a tragedy that doesn’t concern them but that they’ll consume for weeks between one coffee and another, adding imagined details, reconstructing impossible dynamics, enjoying that proximity to disaster that hasn’t touched them but makes them feel incredibly alive.
The data confirm this with that coldness only numbers possess, namely that while the Italian public solemnly declares it prefers constructive news, the kind that restores faith in humanity and the future, in daily practice it obsessively clicks on outlets reporting domestic violence resolved with hatchets, children vanished in the woods during school trips, mothers who drown newborns in bathtubs with that methodical determination that suggests a recipe followed step by step, and boyfriends who stab their ex-girlfriends in front of supermarkets while shopping carts continue to roll indifferently through the parking lots. This contradiction – which is ultimately the contradiction of every human being confronted with their own predatory and voyeuristic nature – gets amplified by social media algorithms, those mathematical devices designed to transform attention into profit and pain into commodity, thus creating an ecology of the negative where others’ suffering becomes a daily consumer product, punctuated like morning prayers or evening aperitifs, a fixed appointment with horror that no one wants to miss.
The Province as Stage
If metropolises offer the alibi of human density, that concentration of lives packed together that necessarily produces waste and deviance, it’s the Italian provinces that serve as the perfect laboratory for observing degeneration in its purest state, the kind born in the silence of single-family homes with geraniums in the windows and garages where secrets accumulate alongside rusted gardening tools. Avetrana and Garlasco aren’t statistical exceptions but representative samples of an Italy that prefers to hide its monsters behind embroidered curtains rather than recognize them for what they are, namely the inevitable product of a society built on systematic hypocrisy and emotional repression passed off as decorum. The murder of Chiara Poggi in 2007 was transformed into a serial fiction that kept Italians glued to their television screens for years, with programmed plot twists, daily-fed alternative theories, a narrative constructed not to arrive at judicial truth but to satisfy that primitive need to participate emotionally in someone else’s destruction, to feel on the right side while consuming another’s life reduced to spectacle.
Every detail was broken down and analyzed with that morbid meticulousness characteristic of those seeking confirmation of their own fears rather than answers: the location where the body was found, the defendant’s behavior, the contradictory statements from family members, everything became raw material for constructing a collective narrative where what mattered wasn’t understanding what had actually happened in that provincial house, but ensuring the show continued long enough to fill the existential voids of millions of viewers. Television in-depth programs – a term that should always be accompanied by ironic quotation marks when discussing Italian true crime – fed this fiction of the real with the knowing complicity of journalists who understand perfectly well they’re selling emotions not information, peddling voyeurism as public service, transforming pain into viewing figures and therefore into cold cash that buys seaside villas and German automobiles.
WhatsApp as Confessional
If once collective curiosity fed on testimonies gathered in town squares, on diaries found in drawers after their owners’ deaths, on letters read in secret while the family was out for Sunday errands, today everything passes through WhatsApp, which has become the archive of our intimacy with a capillarity that not even the Stasi dreamed of achieving in its golden years. Every conversation, every photo snapped hastily and shared carelessly, every voice message recorded while walking down the street cursing the traffic, constitutes the black box of contemporary relationships, ready to be opened and dissected the moment someone decides the content is scandalous enough to merit public dissemination.
The publication of Giacomo Salvini’s book on internal chats within Brothers of Italy has reopened the debate on the boundary between the right to report and the right to privacy, but this debate is inherently hypocritical because it presupposes that a recognizable boundary still exists, when instead that boundary was erased years ago through progressive exposure, normalization of forced transparency, resigned acceptance of the fact that nothing we write, say, or think will remain private if someone has economic or political interest in making it public. Giuseppe Cruciani Giuseppe Cruciani, whose founding statement was “blood and shit”) admitted it with that cynical frankness that allows him to earn well building a career on Italians’ hidden vices: you don’t go into politics because they put you through the X-ray machine, and this simple quip captures the rotten heart of the problem, namely that in a system where every gesture is analyzed and every word scrutinized until it loses any original meaning, what remains isn’t transparency but emotional automation, not authenticity but mediocrity programmed never to say anything that could be used against you.
The case of the feminist chats among Vagnoli, Fonte and Sabene demonstrated that this dynamic spares no one, not even those who build their public identity on defending privacy and individual rights, because the obsession with “seeing inside” private conversations supersedes any ideological or ethical consideration, transforming messages born in a restricted and informal context into judicial or moral evidence to be splashed across front pages. Attention quickly shifted from political content to language, from ideas to personalities, from social scandal to personal scandal, because this is what algorithms reward and what the public consumes with greater avidity: not complexity but gossip, not analysis but indignation, not understanding but mockery.
Conspiracy as Religion
When science dissolved the mystery of the universe by reducing it to mathematical equations devoid of any trace of transcendence, and when politics failed to fill that void with convincing narratives of progress and social justice, the human need to find meaning in things remained orphaned, wandering, desperately searching for something to cling to. Conspiracy fills that void with the perfection of a mythology custom-built for the age of information excess: it offers simple explanations for complex phenomena, identifies clear enemies against whom to hurl accumulated rage, guarantees those who believe it the privilege of feeling more intelligent than the masses who haven’t yet grasped the hidden truth.
Italian true crime – from Lucarelli’s novels to Nazzi’s podcasts, from forums still discussing Pasolini’s death to theories about Ustica that renew themselves with every anniversary – isn’t merely entertainment but a need for narrative order in a reality perceived as opaque and incomprehensible, a desperate attempt to find design where perhaps only chaos exists. As Harari observes with that detached lucidity characteristic of those who view humanity from a distance, the information society no longer seeks truth but merely manages uncertainty, pushing people to construct meaning rather than seek verifiable facts, to prefer coherent narratives over contradictory data, to believe in conspiracies rather than accept the unbearable idea that often things happen without reason, without an identifiable culprit, without an explanation that makes us feel safe.
Desensitization as Destiny
Continuous exposure to represented violence generates what scholars call compassion fatigue, namely the progressive reduction in the capacity to feel empathy when confronted with others’ pain, a psychological defense mechanism that transforms human beings into detached spectators of suffering that flows across screens with the same naturalness as water flows from faucets when you turn the tap. Every corpse shown on television, every interview with grief-stricken family members, every detailed reconstruction of how the killer struck and how many times and with what weapon, contributes to normalizing violence until it becomes part of the daily landscape, something as taken for granted as traffic or bad weather.
Harari, Han and Houellebecq – three thinkers who have built their careers analyzing the decomposition of contemporary society with the enthusiasm of a pathologist dissecting a particularly interesting cadaver – agree that life is made of blood, pain, contradictions and authentic human connections, all things that are progressively disappearing, replaced by digital simulacra and screen-mediated relationships. The future will confront us with a choice that has already been made for us: become machine men and women, perfectly automated and devoid of any emotional deviation that might disturb the system’s functioning, or witness the proliferation of secret societies where what remains of human authenticity will hide, that residue of spontaneity and unpredictability that cannot be quantified, analyzed, monetized.
The phone has become the most personal object we possess and simultaneously the most exposed, the container of our intimacy and the traitor that delivers it to the first interested party, the place where we guard our deepest truths and where those truths become vulnerable to anyone who has access, legal or illegal, to the conversations we believed private. In the society of hyperpervasive communication, the real spectacle is no longer what happens in the external world but what hides inside the phone, and everyone wants to look inside, no one wants to be looked at, because we know that in there lies not just the chronicle of our days but the complete map of our affections, our weaknesses, our irresolvable contradictions.
Morbid curiosity configures itself as a mass device that transforms real events into collective experiences of symbolic consumption, where tragedy becomes content to be lived vicariously with an involvement that confuses empathy with participation in others’ guilt, pain with spectacle, understanding with voyeurism. And in all this, while we consume others’ blood with the same nonchalance as we consume morning coffee, no one seems to notice that we’re slowly losing the capacity to feel anything authentic, that we’re becoming professional spectators of others’ lives because we no longer know how to live our own.
References (because none of this is fiction)
1. Murder of Chiara Poggi (Garlasco case) – Wikipedia EN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Chiara_Poggi
2. Murder of Sarah Scazzi (Avetrana case) – Wikipedia EN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Sarah_Scazzi
3. Media and Social Life – Routledge Academic https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781315794174/media-social-life-mary-beth-oliver-arthur-raney
4. The Daily Beast – Sarah Scazzi Murder Coverage https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-amanda-knox-sarah-scazzis-murder-mystery-unfolding-on-italian-tv/