Gomorra: the origins or how to be “eaten by your environment”
The cult saga of the Neapolitan mafia returns with a spin-off series that takes us back to the 1970s. Meet the young Pietro Savastano and his creator, Leonardo Fasoli.
It is one of the great reference criminal fictions. Adapted from the eponymous book by Roberto Saviano dedicated to the Camorra, Gomorra left its mark on television with 5 seasons and 58 episodes, broadcast between 2014 and 2021. Five years after its conclusion, the saga returns with Gomorra The Origins, a prequel series which intends to tell what the original series had never shown: the young years of Pietro Savastano.
Crowned Best Creation at the last Monte-Carlo Television Festival, this new series takes us back to Naples, in 1977, to follow a Pietro aged only 15. An orphan, he grew up in the disadvantaged neighborhoods of Secondigliano and survived by helping out local criminals, between petty thefts and schemes. Still far from the Don Pietro we know, he is just a street urchin who is looking for his place and dreams of getting out.
Gomorra The Origins thus tells the birth of a character that fans already know. How will this ambitious young boy gradually become the formidable Don Pietro Savastano? How did Naples become the capital of crime? And what events will shape the one who will become one of the most significant characters in the saga? That’s the whole point of this dive into Gomorra’s past.
Why tell the origins of Pietro?
Present in Monte-Carlo last June, producer and creator Leonardo Fasoli explains to Première why this prequel is something essential:
“There are a lot of unexplained things in the original series. We don’t know anything about their past. How the city evolved into a capital of crime and how Don Pietro Savastano becomes the boss of this organization. Who is Ciro? Why is he called the Immortal? It’s never said in the series, so we felt like it was necessary to explain and reconstruct the past, including how the characters became what they became. It’s a whole new world to which we bring to life, which allows us to better understand Pietro, this street kid who will become this merciless boss. Through the city of this era, we understand why he evolved like that.
This Pietro is very different from the one we know. He is already ambitious and above all determined to get through it. He follows in the footsteps of Angelo, his charismatic model, the neighborhood “mermaid” who works for godfather Don Antonio Villa.
Gomorra The Origins thus precisely recounts the mechanisms which will lead the boy towards the mafia.
A radically different Naples
The city that we discover in Origins no longer has much to do with that of the original series. “It was a very different city in the 1970s. Italian society was different, values were different and even the criminal world was different. There was less talk about drug trafficking,” says the designer. “It was more of a gaming mafia and there was a Camorra code of honor: we did not kill for pleasure. Only as a last resort. The weight of drugs and heroin in criminal organizations, in Italy but throughout the world, considerably changed the environment after the 1970s…”
Meticulous reconstruction work was therefore carried out to find this Naples of the seventies. The series also intends to stick as closely as possible to historical reality. “We are in fiction because we invent all the narrative arcs. But everything else is based on things that existed, on a lot of research work. Even the way of speaking at the time, we worked a lot to reconstruct their way of speaking at the time in southern Italy in the 1970s. It was really a very particular language.”
Directed by Marco D’Amore, who played Ciro Di Marzio in the original series, the series draws on the striking atmosphere of the city at the time, with a very different aesthetic from that of Gomorra:
“It’s a new style of cinema. Another era, another atmosphere, other colors. Gomorra the series is darker, grayer, because it’s all about power. It’s Succession in a criminal empire. It’s almost a Shakespearean drama about family and power. Gomorra The Origins is totally a different, more human approach. We first follow children, who have plenty of possibilities before them. We try to better understand why and how we become who we become…”
A new Pietro Savastano
To play young Pietro, Luca Lubrano takes up the cult role played by Salvatore Esposito in the original series. A delicate task, but the actor above all sought to “not imitate” his predecessor. “Don’t copy because it’s not really the same character deep down. The idea is to understand why he is so fragile, where his flaws come from and this desire to take personal revenge on life,” the young Italian actor confides to us. “He’s searching for his identity and it’s a time bomb that’s going to explode into the Pietro we know from the original series.”
Young Pietro is thus presented as an ambitious teenager who doesn’t really have any other choice to survive: “He doesn’t accept the life that his environment has given him. He tries to react. And he sees in Angelo a kind of model. He seems free. He fascinates him. He must fight to find his place even if it means sitting on his innocence. And besides, the only thing he keeps from his youth, into adulthood, is Imma, the love of his life.”
We already know how this story will end. Pietro will become the character that viewers know. But that’s precisely what makes this dive into his past interesting: showing how an environment can shape a teenager.
“How we are ultimately the sum of our choices dictated by the environment in which we grow up,” summarizes Luca Lubrano. “Sometimes, we are eaten by our environment. Sometimes, we survive it. It is obviously not a question of justifying criminality, but of explaining its origins deep down. All humans must make choices but some are more constrained than others…”
Gomorrah: the origins, in 6 episodes, to watch on Canal + from Monday August 24, 2026.
