Italians are masters of two things: soccer and faits accomplis. If in the sports bar everyone is the coach of the national team, every bar on the peninsula is a council chamber where sentences are passed without appeal. Far from being a people of saints, poets and seafarers, they are more like technical commissars and failed judges. Nevertheless, the search for truth is an uncertain process through the labyrinth where official truths, "other" truths, unspeakable truths, and the truths of the courts chase each other. It has always been this way, even before television. And it is still so today, when on the Internet ruthless "judges" point fingers at the guilty, reopen cases that have been tried, and refute verdicts. Anything goes now. The history of Italy is written in blood, and Giancarlo De Cataldo traces it through some emblematic crimes that reflect the changing of the times. For These Reasons is a story of excellent victims, second-hand executioners and mysterious clients, of hypothetical conspiracies and all-too-real disinformation. And it is the story of truth seekers: of journalists with few scruples in their hearts and a lot of hair on their belly, of policemen who see far and remain unheard, and of judges who try to unravel clues, evidence, and biased expertise. Per questi motivi is also the formula with which the reading of the verdict is introduced at the end of a trial and which sums up the meaning of an exhausting search. The author of Romanzo criminale moves from the Torvajanica beach, where Wilma Montesi's body was found on April 11, 1953, to the Idroscalo in Ostia, where Pier Paolo Pasolini was massacred. The death of the model Christa Wanninger on the Via Veneto of the "dolce vita", the season of the armed struggle, the bombing of the synagogue in Rome, the murder of Simonetta Cesaroni and some recent, unimaginable events of bloodshed are some of the chapters of a book with unprecedented revelatory tones that cross personal memories and civic memory, private obsessions and collective ghosts.