The eighties begin with a bang. At Bologna station, on August 2nd, eighty-five people die beneath the rubble. It marks the start of a decade that opens with a massacre and closes with a collapsing wall that signals the end of the twentieth century. In between come the wars of the mafia, the Camorra and the ’Ndrangheta, P2 and the fascists. In the South, people are killed with ferocity, while the country—carefree and distracted—pays little attention to the gunshots and changes its skin: it stops believing in politics and starts believing in television; the “people” become an “audience,” and individual success shapes a new moral code. The North prospers, and the desperate South is on the verge of becoming a narco-state. There are the assassinations of Piersanti Mattarella, Pio La Torre, Walter Tobagi and Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, but also the death of a little boy named Alfredo; there are the rises of Cutolo and Riina, and the steady voice of Giovanni Falcone, a solitary man, a great reluctant hero. There are Berlinguer’s funerals and an Italy both moved and moving in bidding him farewell; and then Bettino Craxi and Milan-to-drink, Raffaella Carrà’s beans and young Milanese craving hamburgers, while an enigmatic Cossiga becomes President of the Republic and we lose Italo Calvino, Primo Levi and Leonardo Sciascia. There is the most beautiful football ever played, with the Spanish World Cup of ’82, Maradona and Napoli’s scudetto, the snowfall of the century, Renzo Arbore’s nights, the “I must break you” of the Russian boxer Ivan Drago, the dawn of the PC, the new knights of capitalism—Benetton, Gardini, De Benedetti and Berlusconi: Italy rediscovering itself as modern and cynical, hungry for success and status. A widespread euphoria coexists with a gigantic and unprecedented criminal experiment that brands the decade like a hot iron. In Sicily, the State seems absent, magistrates are murdered, the mafia enters the stock market and the South becomes the testing ground for a delinquent form of capitalism that will spread throughout the country. And there are the dead. More than ten thousand. It is the “civil war that no one wanted to see.” Enrico Deaglio and Ivan Carozzi recount these ten years as a great civic novel, built through chronicles, voices, images, facts, dreams, fashions and fears. A choral narrative in which History enters homes through the evening news and advertising, through massacres and through music. The Eighties is a clear-eyed and passionate portrait of a country surviving its own ghosts: a decade of radical transformations, where everything seems new but nothing has truly changed. It is the story of how we began to become what we are. A grand fresco of history and reportage, an Italy discovering the power of television and money, swept up in a peculiar euphoria while the South counts its terrible dead. Italy in the eighties: a powerful, reckless, unsinkable ship. Like the Titanic?