He fights the Italian mob with words

ROME — Roberto Saviano went to war when he was 23.

The daring writer got on his motorcycle and prowled the savage empire of the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia: ports, sweatshops, housing projects and toxic waste dumps.

The result was "Gomorrah," an angry, poetic expose of the mob's murderous might and swaggering, self-referential subculture. In the surprise 2006 bestseller, Saviano riffs on female gangsters who drive Smart cars and wear yellow jumpsuits like Uma Thurman in "Kill Bill." An underworld boss who modeled his garish mansion on the one in "Scarface" and named his son Ivanhoe because he reads Sir Walter Scott. Doomed teenage gunslingers nicknamed Tonino Kit-Kat and Donnie, as in Donnie Brasco.

Building on his success, Saviano was co-writer of a film adaptation that won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival this year and is Italy's entry for the Academy Awards.

But today, he lives like the fugitive gangsters whom he chronicled: enduring round-the-clock protection, changing hide-outs, avoiding daylight.

Last week, two unmarked police sedans with flashing blue lights stopped on a quiet hilltop street here. Three bodyguards with the smooth, tough air of Italian plainclothes police hurried out to escort the author into the offices of his publisher.

Saviano, a close-cropped 29-year-old, has the physique of an amateur welterweight boxer, a sport he has taken up to relieve stress. He alternates between steely determination and a brooding weariness. He has caused a commotion by saying he might leave Italy to escape the dangers and pressures of his vita blindata, or armored life.

"Right now the most difficult task for me is not writing a new book, but reclaiming my life," he said, slumped on a couch.

"I don't have a home. . . . I move constantly. My family lives in northern Italy. All the people I knew in the past have distanced themselves, my girlfriends, everybody, everybody, everybody."

Anti-mafia investigators, an internationally respected law enforcement elite, praise Saviano's courage in trumpeting their struggle to the world.

"I admire him because he created a new genre that has greatly widened the audience," said Antonio Laudati, a top Justice Ministry official who led major Camorra prosecutions in his native Naples. "This was an issue that primarily interested specialists, prosecutors, journalists. Saviano broke open a new front. He informed the man on the street. He turned our prosecution files into literature."