Maurizio Mini presents “La Banda dei Musi Neri”

Urban violence, red zones, bans, real or exaggerated fears, insecurity at the center of the often radical transformations of a city and the habits of its inhabitants, themes at the center of today’s news that will be addressed on Friday, November 7th, at the Afternoons at the Vespucci-Colombo Library, starting from the story told in the new novel by Maurizio Mini “The Band of the Black Snouts” (Erasmo Editions, 2025), a band of criminals who between 1839 and 1840 “… made the entire city of Livorno live in fear and terror“.

The appointment is at 6 PM, in the Assembly Hall of the Institute, located in Piazza Vigo. With the author, the psychologist Nicola Artico, director of the Psychology operational unit and of the Child and Adolescent mental health clinical unit of the Asl Tuscany northwest, and the actor and director Claudio Monteleone who will read and interpret some passages from the book.

The event is in collaboration with Erasmo Libri.

The gang, called ‘del Ciolli’, from Antonio Ciolli, the leader, a dark and ruthless figure, or ‘of the black snouts’, because they painted their faces with the black of pans, acts in the shadows, strikes at random; wounds, kills, disappears. No theft: the intent is to sow death and fear. Only in February 1840 all the members of the gang will be discovered and arrested. They will be sentenced to life hard labor.

Maurizio Mini reconstructs this story in a novel, where fantasy intersects with characters who really lived in Livorno in the first half of the nineteenth century. A tale that returns to the present a dark piece of nineteenth-century Livorno, and reminds us how violence can be empty, useless, and fierce.

Maurizio Mini, journalist, was born in Livorno in 1950. In collaboration with other authors, he has produced for Erasmo Editions the volumes: ‘Livorno from American music to Jazz’ (2103); ‘The word to Enrico’ (2014); ‘Kick-off whistle 1915’ (2015); ‘Modigliani – An exhibition that scandalized. Paris, Berthe Weill Gallery (2017). Also for Erasmo Editions, he published his first novel ‘The screenplay’ in 2020. And in 2023 the essay ‘Frankie Goes To Leghorn’. He is one of the members of the Livorno Unesco Jazz Day Committee.

INFO: biblioteca@vespucci.edu.it