Portobello

 Someone must have slandered Josef K., for without having done anything wrong, he was arrested one morning.
Franz Kafka 

From the very outset of this narrative block, the question posed by Enzo Biagi—what if Tortora were innocent?—resonates as an epistemological fissure: not a simple hypothesis, but a breach through which to observe the functioning of an entire system that requires guilt in order to preserve its own stability. At the same time, Rome appears plastered with images of the disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi, a ghostly presence crossing the visual background of the series and suggesting a nation suspended in a state of permanent mourning, unable to distinguish between disappearance, erasure, and the narrative construction of truth. 

Tortora, meanwhile, clings to an almost ontological principle: innocence as an absolute, non-negotiable fact. His conviction that he will leave prison because he has nothing to confess becomes his first, tragic form of political resistance. The transfer on 15 August 1983 from Rome to Bergamo marks a crucial dramaturgical turning point: the journey takes on the shape of an inner descent, in which the public figure is transformed into a confined body, inhabited by a rage that is not merely personal but metaphysical, directed against the arbitrariness of judicial power. 

Bellocchio constructs the accusatory network through a gallery of figures that seem to emerge from a grotesque and hallucinatory dimension. Mario Gresti embodies the mythomaniac nature of testimony, while Giovanni Pandico—dissociated, paranoid, feverishly obsessive—becomes the paradigm of a truth fabricated as a delirious narrative which, nonetheless, is absorbed by the judicial apparatus as probative material. The series insists on the performative nature of accusations: the pentiti fabricate stories functional to their own survival in prison, turning language into a form of currency. Their refrain—why should I lie? what would I gain from it?—takes on the cadence of a mantra that reveals, precisely through its apparent linearity, the profoundly contractual nature of justice. 

Tortora’s alleged involvement in drug trafficking, the supposed Milanese affiliation with the Nuova Camorra Organizzata, and the accusation of having diverted funds intended for the victims of the Irpinia earthquake compose a stratification of guilt that seems to obey a mythological rather than a procedural logic. The small notebook containing a name and a phone number becomes the series’ symbolic object: an insignificant artifact transformed into an accusatory totem, capable of condensing the entire judicial paradox. 

The character portrayed by Beppe Barra and the depiction of the Cutolo clan introduce an additional allegorical layer. The Camorra appears as a spectacular, almost theatrical community, where crime coexists with folkloric rituals and distorted forms of sociality. Emblematic is the scene of the “luxury camorristi” watching the Sanremo Music Festival together with prison guards: Bellocchio stages a suspension of moral hierarchies, suggesting that the boundary between legality and illegality dissolves within the media spectacle. 

The granting of house arrest in January 1984 introduces a domestic dimension saturated with symbolism. Tortora’s Milanese apartment becomes a metaphorical space dominated by the figure of Pulcinella—a mask of cruel jest and mocking fate—and by hourglasses that mark a time no longer linear but circular, in which waiting turns into existential torture. Here Bellocchio insists on the transformation of the television man, accustomed to mastering spectacular time, into a subject forced to confront the devastating slowness of justice. 

The confrontation with Giovanni Melluso represents one of the most disturbing moments of the series. The use of the diminutive “Enzino” produces a violent psychological rupture: the victim is infantilized, dragged into an artificially constructed memory that blends nightclubs and alleged encounters with Turatello. Memory becomes a manipulable instrument, unstable ground upon which truth dissolves. 

At the same time, Bellocchio intertwines Pandico’s personal story with the explosion of the container in which his mother lived after the Irpinia earthquake. This episode introduces a tragic dimension suggesting that institutional violence and criminal violence are part of the same historical landscape. Individual suffering is transformed into fuel for the construction of judicial falsehood. 

Tortora’s election on the Radical Party lists led by Marco Pannella—accompanied by the grotesque accusation that he received the votes of 555 camorristi—marks the definitive shift from the procedural to the openly political dimension. Innocence is no longer merely a legal matter but becomes an act of civic militancy, a gesture of opposition to the punitive power of the State. 

The historical irruption of the Chernobyl disaster, evoked in the narrative background, amplifies the sense of systemic contamination. Bellocchio suggests an implicit parallel: just as the radioactive cloud renders the nuclear catastrophe invisible yet pervasive, judicial error spreads through society like a toxin, altering the collective perception of truth. 

After the ten-year sentence, the appeal phase introduces a fundamental narrative mutation. Judge Michele Morello assumes the role of an almost archaeological figure, committed to reconstructing the temporal stratification of testimonies. His work consists in dismantling the apparent linearity of the accusatory narrative, revealing how witnesses were able to communicate with one another, turning the trial into a collective construction of falsehood. 

The confrontation between Vallanzasca and Melluso represents one of the dramatic peaks of the series. Vallanzasca—himself a criminal, yet endowed with a certain internal coherence—publicly dismantles the credibility of the pentito, reducing him to a marginal figure. Bellocchio uses this clash to destabilize the moral hierarchy between criminals and institutions, showing how truth can emerge precisely from the margins of legality. 

Tortora’s final return to Portobello assumes an almost liturgical dimension. The host re-enters the television space that had consecrated him, yet the gesture appears emptied of meaning. He can no longer sustain the game, having understood that spectacle, like justice, functions through the construction of collective narratives that require sacrificial victims. 

The motto running through these episodes—to be guilty of innocence—becomes the philosophical synthesis of the entire work. Bellocchio suggests that innocence, in a system dominated by the logic of suspicion, does not represent a condition of salvation but an extreme form of exposure. Tortora thus becomes a modern tragic figure: not the hero who fights power, but the body upon which power inscribes its own necessity to exist. 

In these episodes, Portobello therefore configures itself as a meditation on the fragility of truth in the age of judicial and media spectacularization. Bellocchio constructs a fresco in which the State, the media, and organized crime appear as interconnected narrative devices capable of producing alternative realities. Trapped within this symbolic machine, Tortora becomes the site where justice reveals its most unsettling nature: not the pursuit of truth, but the need to narrate it. 

Crowning this segment of the series is a cinephilic stratification that further enriches the work’s texture. Bellocchio scatters Portobello with Fellinian echoes, particularly in the construction of a human universe suspended between the grotesque and the metaphysical: the figures of pentiti, spectacularized camorristi, and media extras seem to inhabit a dimension reminiscent of the surreal, carnivalesque processions of Amarcord or La dolce vita, where reality deforms itself to reveal its theatrical and profoundly Italian nature. 

At the same time, a subtle Sorrentinian resonance can be felt in the representation of power as an aestheticized stage, in the ability to transform chronicle into elegiac fresco, and in the construction of images that combine solemnity and decay, the sacred and the profane. 

Yet Bellocchio does not limit himself to citation. He once again confirms his extraordinary ability to use individual narratives as a magnifying lens for national history. Through the Tortora case, the director delivers a lucid analysis of Italy in the 1980s, marked by political contradictions, media-driven impulses, and institutional fragilities that continue to reverberate in the present. 

Supporting this narrative architecture is a cast of exceptional interpretative precision, capable of avoiding mere imitation to deliver layered, vibrant characters suspended between documentation and dramatic transfiguration. 
The result is a work that confirms Bellocchio as one of the most lucid interpreters of the ethical and political fractures of contemporary society, capable of interrogating collective memory and transforming it into a critical device of rare aesthetic and political intensity. 

The trial is the place where the law becomes flesh and blood.
Piero Calamandrei