The disaster happened over only ten years. A Capitol brought down to its knees, commissariats, on its last legs, defeated by widespread corruption. A municipality and a region overwhelmed by the savage proliferation of scandals that touched in equal measure left and right wing administrations. A city bloodied by the internecine guerrilla warfare of criminal organizations, and behind them the shadow of a new kind of mafia, just as dangerous. Where did this filth that submerges Rome come from? Is it the illegality and malfeasance that besiege and pollute the Capitol? Or is it the power to evoke them to use them for personal aims? Who has a stranglehold on the principal Italian cities? Massimo Carminati, the fascist ex-terrorist presumed to be the boss of the Roman mafia and the ex-king of the communist cooperatives, Salvatore Buzzi? Or is it the financial powers that have always dominated Rome? The Mafia Capitol inquest revealed an unthinkable degree of pervasive corruption, in which contaminations with the criminal world found ample space. But it also created a convenient alibi for politicians’ terrible offences. Andrea Colombo, a high power journalist, narrates the events of his city beginning with the Marrazzo case that seems to come straight out of one of James Ellroy’s books to the fall of the Polverini faction, the Alemanno era and the era of Marino “the Martian” until the arrival of the “commissars”. He reconstructs an inquest on the dark relationships connecting politics, crime and neo-fascism in Rome and about the equally murky relations connecting political power, customers and financial lobbies. This is the new “Romanzo Criminale” about the Middle World.