Family fought for 12 years to establish son’s innocence
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| Antonio Landieri's disability meant he was unable to escape as Camorra gunmen opened fire |
Antonio and his friends were leaving the club, at the side of a square known to be frequented by drug dealers, when a car pulled up a short distance away from them in Via Labriola. A group of armed men emerged from the car and began shooting at them.
His friends instinctively ran away but Antonio, who could walk but only with severely restricted mobility - the consequence of complications at birth that left him partially paralysed - could not keep up and was hit several times in the back. He died in the arms of his mother, who had heard the shots being fired and ran down 11 flights of stairs from the family’s apartment in the run-down complex, fearful for her son’s safety.
The shooting made headlines in the local papers, who reported it as the latest event in a rapidly evolving war between rival Camorra gangs that would leave 70 dead in six months. The dead man, they said, was associated with the Di Lauro clan which controlled much of Scampia; the attackers were from the Amato-Pagano clan from neighbouring Secondigliano.
Antonio Lampieri’s family insisted this was not the case but few people other than relatives and close friends believed them. The police refused to allow Antonio a public funeral on the grounds that it could lead to more criminality.
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| The Vele di Scampia apartment blocks acquired their name because their shape resembled sails |
His family’s bid to convince people otherwise was not helped by the reputation of the Vele, also known as the Sette Palazzi - the Seven Palaces.
A large urban housing project built between 1962 and 1975, the Vele di Scampia consisted of seven massive apartment blocks, constructed to house between 40,000 to 70,000 people. The blocks were dubbed vele (sails) for their triangular shape.
The complex was inspired by modernist housing developments pioneered by French-Swiss architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier.
The architect in charge, Francesco Di Salvo, was a specialist in low-cost housing and the Vele di Scampia buildings were designed to provide only subsistence-level dwellings. Although they were deliberately minimal, they were to have many shared exterior spaces. Di Salvo believed he could construct apartment blocks that recreated the spirit of the alleys and courtyards of historic Naples, crowded but congenial.
But costs soon exceeded the city’s budget for the project, with funds frequently stolen, and the green spaces, schools, common areas and playgrounds that were meant to become the pulsating heart of a thriving community never materialised.
The promised public transport links with central Naples were never built and the Sette Palazzi turned into a hotspot for organised crime. Prostitution and drug-dealing took place openly. The police only occasionally took any notice and Scampia, which like Secondigliano had been a rural village before Naples began to expand, became a symbol for urban decline.
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| Naples mayor Luigi De Magistris commended the Landieri family |
Antonio’s parents, Enzo and Raffaella, never gave up their fight to achieve justice for their son, despite being offered money by the family of one of the gunmen as compensation in return for giving up their quest for the truth.
They were helped in their cause by numerous groups and associations set up to campaign on their behalf, by a tenacious anti-mafia prosecutor, Maurizio De Marco, and ultimately by evidence given by eight different Camorra pentiti - informants who had struck deals with prosecutors to reduce their own sentences.
The process took 12 years but it was finally established that the intended victims were the Meola brothers, Vittorio and Salvatore, who were Di Lauro affiliates. Antonio Landieri had been mistaken for a Meola associate known to have difficulty walking.
In 2017, Landieri’s parents at last learned that their son was to be given official state recognition as an innocent victim of the Camorra. The mayor of Naples, Luigi De Magistris, commended the family for “never giving up in the search for truth and in the pursuit of justice".
The five individuals named as the perpetrators of the killing were sentenced to life imprisonment. Others involved had died before the case came to trial.
Landieri has been honoured in a number of ways in Scampia, with a tree planted in his name near Piazza Giovanni Paolo II, an annual poetry competition held for the Antonio Landieri prize and the local football stadium renamed Stadio Antonio Landieri.
A book dedicated to him - entitled Al di là della neve, storie di Scampia (Beyond the Snow, Stories of Scampia) - written by his cousin, Rosario Esposito La Rossa, won the 2008 Siani Prize.
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| Roberto Saviano's book put Scampia in the spotlight |
Though hardly a tourist attraction in the conventional sense, Scampia attracts some visitors, particularly because of the notoriety of the Vele. The area was immortalised by the author and investigative journalist Roberto Saviano in his book, Gomorrah, which documented Saviano's infiltration and investigation of a number areas of business and daily life controlled or affected by the Camorra. Scenes from both the film and TV series based on the book were filmed in the neighbourhood, some inside the actual Vele complex. It was seen in a better light, however, when US actor Stanley Tucci’s culinary series, Searching for Italy, ventured into the area to feature a bistrot run by local volunteers. The intention to demolish the complex’s remaining blocks was announced in 2016 and residents began moving out in 2019 but it was later announced that one block was to be preserved and repurposed as offices.
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| The Piazza del Plebiscito is the largest public square in the city of Naples |
Scampia, which is just a 10-minute drive from Naples’s Capodichino international airport, is less than 10km (six miles) from the centre of the city, which many tourists do visit. They are drawn by such attractions as Teatro di San Carlo, the oldest continuously active venue for public opera in the world; the large open space of the Piazza del Plebiscito, which adjoins the Palazzo Reale; the Capodimonte Royal Palace and Museum, which houses works by Caravaggio, Raphael and Botticelli; the Santa Chiara religious complex; the elegant, glass-domed Galleria Umberto I, a 19th century shopping arcade; and the 12th century Castel dell'Ovo, located on a promontory and offering beautiful views of the harbour and Mount Vesuvius, the volcano - officially still active, although dormant since 1944 - that overlooks the city.
Also on this day:
1835: The birth of criminologist Cesare Lombroso
1891: The birth of entrepreneur Giovanni Buitoni
2007: The death of author and journalist Enzo Biagi
