'Please tell me what happened, because I can't grasp it.' Nicola Lagioia wrote a penetrating book about a brutal murder in Rome.

Five years ago, Rome was rocked by a brutal, bloody murder. Under the influence of cocaine and alcohol, two near-thirties murdered for no reason a young man they did not know. Writer and journalist Nicola Lagioia, like many other compatriots, was gripped by the case. 'This is not just a story about a murder, but mostly about loneliness.'

Manuel Foffo and Marco Prato have been 'partying' in Manuel's flat in a Rome suburb for several days. Although they have only known each other for a short time, the men stir something in each other, a dark force. For days on end, they intoxicate themselves with large quantities of cocaine and vodka, until things get completely out of hand. They start having all sorts of rape fantasies and Marco gets the idea to call 23-year-old Luca Varani, a handsome boy who is always tight on money and therefore occasionally earns extra money as a prostitute, without his girlfriend knowing. When Luca arrives at their house, they drug him and decide he must die; what follows is an orgy of violence.

Dividing line

Nicola Lagioia (48) is accused by his newspaper La Repubblica asked to write a report on the issue. At first he refuses; the case reminds him of a bad period in his life when, as a teenager, he was consumed by anger and turned to drink. But soon he is so taken by the case that he cannot ignore it. City of the living is the equally chilling and fascinating and compelling account of events. A book that encourages reflection on culpability, how well a person can know himself and his loved ones, and the dividing line between a successful and a disastrous life, which is much thinner than we like to believe.

What attracted you so much to this case?

'The place where the murder had taken place is not that far from where I live, ten minutes by car. So when the news was announced, on 6 March 2016, it immediately caught my attention. It was as if a meteorite had fallen behind my house and I could take a look. The first reason I was so struck by it was the extreme violence that had accompanied this murder. This was not just another murder in a big city, no, it seemed like a ritual murder. The second aspect was the utter lack of motive. Marco Prato and Manuel Foffo had absolutely nothing to gain from killing Luca Varani; Marco barely knew him, Manuel not at all.'

Normal people

'The third element that struck me is that this murder did not take place in the usual criminal circuit. Marco and Manuel were considered 'normal people'. If you had told them the week before that they would end up in jail for committing a gruesome murder, they would have called you crazy. The two men are very different, but have one thing in common, which is that they are pathological narcissists, who always see only themselves.'

'But what struck me most was the fact that when they appeared in court, they seemed to be outside themselves, as it were; they seemed to take the fact that they had committed that murder for granted, but were hardly aware of it. As if the bridge between thinking and doing had collapsed. Manuel Foffo told prosecutors in court, "Just put me in jail, give me life in prison for all I care, but please tell me what happened, because I can't comprehend it." I found that staggering.'

In the public mind, killers are quickly bombarded as monsters, as happened now. Why?

'That is a psychological defence mechanism, because then we don't have to think that we ourselves might also commit such atrocities. Transforming perpetrators into monsters makes it all a lot easier.

But in literature, you have to do just the opposite and show the complexity. Literature is full of complicated characters tainted by very serious acts. Just think of the character Raskolnikov in Crime and punishment by Dostoevsky. Raskolnikov premeditatedly murders his landlord, yet we do not define him as a monster, but as a human being, with all sorts of shades of emotions; he also has noble feelings, but that does not mean he cannot be guilty of terrible offences. Dostoevsky describes him in all his complexity, and that is how it should be in literature.'

Culprit

Lagioia himself does dare to make that connection with possible perpetration. He describes that in his teenage years, he was so angry about his parents' divorce and the subsequent concealment of that divorce in the outside world that things got worse and worse for him. He started drinking, including throwing bottles down from the eighth floor of a flat - and narrowly missing a girl walking down the street.

You make no secret of the fact that things could have ended so badly with yourself, so to speak. What happened?

'I dug so deep into other people's lives that I automatically started asking questions about a turbulent period in my own life. I felt it only fair to share something about that. In my final year of school, a friend and I wanted to become blood brothers in a drunken stupor. First we cut our arms with a knife, then we chopped up the novel In the name of the rose by Umberto Eco to shreds. Drunk, we got into the car, I lost control of the wheel and crashed hard into a parked car. In no time, a whole crowd gathered around us. With blood stains on his jumper and the knife still in his hand, my friend got out of the car and shouted, "We killed Umberto Eco!" The onlookers thought he had really killed someone.

Adult

When I was writing this book, I was irrevocably confronted with the question: what would have happened if I had not crashed into a parked car at the time, but had hit someone? Then my life would have been very different. Of course, there are big differences between my situation then and that of Marco and Manuel. Firstly, the two of them had an accumulation of mistakes between January and March 2016, where they acted increasingly rashly. In addition, it happened to me during puberty, which is now more often a period when you act carelessly. Marco and Manuel were in their late twenties, but it seems as if they never really grew up'.

For you, the accident was a turning point for the better: you stopped drinking and started studying seriously.

'That's right. If you have escaped a tragedy - because that's what we can call it: if I had hit someone, it really would have been a tragedy - and fate has been favourable to you, you have to do everything you can to never find yourself in a similar situation again. Marco and Manuel just stubbornly continued committing stupidity, and the fateful result was that someone died. Or rather two people, because Marco Prato committed suicide in his cell afterwards.'

Troubled characters

What did it do to you to be in the minds and actions of these people for so long?

'Three people who were previously not a part of my life suddenly became the people I thought of most every day from morning to night for years from March 2016. That was tough emotionally. But it is part of my profession: as a writer, you always have to get into the skin of your characters, in fiction just as much. For Joseph Conrad, I am sure it was no less complicated for his novel Heart of Darkness to delve into the dark thoughts of his protagonist Kurtz, than it was for me to write about Prato and Foffo. I have been used to the presence of unsettling characters for years. What was trickier, though, was that I was now dealing with real people. It took a lot of effort to gain their trust and build a relationship with them.'

What makes this story interesting for people outside Italy, what can we learn from it?

'This is not just a story about a murder, but mostly about loneliness. Marco and Manuel were extremely lonely people. I believe there is actually a certain kind of loneliness in the whole western world today, because there is a lot of narcissism and many people struggle to understand who they are. The themes and feelings in the book are universal.'