words by Rebecca Lloyd

I moved to Italy in 2004. I'd worked as a financial auditor for four years in London and taken a two-year career break to live and work in Italy. I taught, to begin with, in a small town south of Florence. It was heaven. I loved the teaching and life was simple and easy there. After two years I resigned from my job. I wasn't ready to leave Italy.

I'd always wanted to write but had never really believed that I would be any good, so I had kept putting it off. There in Italy, with more mental space and doing a job where I worked afternoons and evenings, I had the time to write. It started with football. My second summer in Italy was the summer of the Calciopoli match-fixing scandal and as I had started supporting Fiorentina and going to all the home games and even a few away games. It fascinated me and I read everything I could about it. That summer in England I explained it to my friends and one suggested that I write about it. I did. I send some sample articles to a few magazines and newspapers and Italy Magazine were interested. It gave me enormous confidence to have had such success so soon. I wrote a monthly column for Italy Magazine for nearly two years and the discipline of creating something new each month taught me a lot. That next summer I decided to do a writing course.

Italy is easy to fall in love with, but the more you get to know the country the more you have to confront very ugly facts. Getting an Italian boyfriend accelerated the process. He lent me books about Italian politics and history and explained the news to me. Although my Italian is fluent now, I still find it hard to read Italian newspapers – I find the stories too dense to follow and the number of characters daunting. My boyfriend had been politically active when he was younger but had given up out of frustration. But he still dreamed of change and how that could be brought about. Which is where the idea for my first book came about. My boyfriend invented the character of Pietro Fabbri, a middle aged Italian who decides to act. And I wrote the book. But while it is very critical of Italy, I wrote it out of love for the country, which in the seven years I lived there had changed. Italians had become angrier and yet at the same time more resigned. Arresi – surrendered – was the way one Italian friend described them.

For the worst thing about Italy is that nothing seems to change; and yet things get gradually worse. For Italy has been going through a difficult time since it was founded one hundred and fifty years ago. It seemed that Italy had found stability after the Second World War but it was a false stability – propped up by the Catholic Church and the Americans who were desperate to ensure that Italy did not ‘go’ communist. From the late sixties to the late eighties Italian history was scarred by the anni di piombo – the years of lead. Far right and far left terrorist groups – with the rather murky involvement of the secret services and the mafia – conducted assassinations, bombings, kidnappings and gambizzamenti – the Italian equivalent of the knee-capping.

But while difficult, those were decades of economic growth and Italians were richer than they had ever been. Now they are poorer than they have been for a long time. The economy has hardly grown in the past ten years – according to a special report by the Economist, Italy has outperformed only Zimbabwe and Haiti on the world stage. And the Tangentopoli investigation of the early to mid nineties, which exposed the extent of political corruption, should have allowed Italy to start afresh with a clean sheet. But though some people were arrested, some went into exile and others killed themselves, the corruption survived. And so it seems to the right time to publish a book about a man who tries to change things; tries to make Italians wake up to the reality of what is happening in their country.

The Second Shot is set in the near future, in an Italy with all the problems of today, but where civil liberties have been completely eroded and the government has resorted to torture to maintain power and destroy all opposition. The main character Pietro Fabbri, a middle aged man from Campi Bisenzio – a small town just outside Florence – sets up a website to raise money from Italians so that he can pay for a professional hit man to kill the president. And in setting up that website he inspires Italians to act and the people take to the streets. But this is Italy, polarised as it is between left and right, and in response to anti-government demonstrations, pro-government demonstrators also take to the streets and Italy is plunged into civil unrest.

His plan to kill the president takes Pietro to St Petersburg to set up the website on an illegal server and to Lyon to find the hit man. And once the website is live, he had to go on the run. He has six months to put his plan into action. And the police have six months to stop him and save the life of the president.

The Second Shot is a dark but also darkly funny page-turner that gives readers an insight into contemporary Italy.

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Rebecca Lloyd, alias CR Lloyd, lived and worked in Italy for seven years. She taught English to Italians in a small town south of Florence for three years before moving to Florence to work in a pub while she concentrated on her writing. She now lives in Brighton.