From Jimmy Savile to the Rotherham scandal, child sexual abuse has become a recurring nightmare of our society, and thus is inevitably grist to the TV dramatist’s mill.

The 2003 first, Italian edition of La Frantumaglia begins with words from Elena Ferrante’s publisher, Edizioni E/O, about why the book of collected writings was published: “To satisfy the curiosity of [Ferrante’s] exacting yet generous audience, we decided to collect here some letters from the author to Edizioni E/O; the few interviews she has given; and her correspondence with particular readers. Among other things, these writings should clarify, we hope conclusively, the writer’s motives for remaining outside the media circus and its demands, as she has for 10 years.”

Cheekily bottom-like, their downy skin blushing enticingly, these must be the sexiest apricots ever painted. If you held out your hand, you might just be able to touch them, there in the foreground of what is thought to be Caravaggio’s earliest surviving painting. Echoing the skin tones of a boy absorbed in the act of peeling fruit, the light highlights his hands and his downcast eyes make us voyeurs in a scene of unexpected sensuality.

There’s a doctor on Lampedusa who has nightmares about the corpses the sea brings to his island: the women who give birth on sinking boats with umbilical cords left uncut, the diesel-poisoned skins, and those left to dehydrate and rot in holds. Perhaps 400,000 refugees have arrived at this Italian outpost nearer to Libya than Sicily, perhaps 15,000 dying. Gianfranco Rosi’s Berlin Golden Bear-winning documentary closely observes both Lampedusa’s enduring seafaring culture, and the death and disaster crashing into it from neighbouring cataclysms.

Guiseppe Penone’s lyrical and tactile works, made from the simple elemental materials that typify the 1960s Italian Arte Povera movement (of which he is a key exponent), belong largely to the outside world of woods and gardens. But they also find an ideal setting in the serene light-filled spaces of Marian Goodman Gallery, where Penone’s perennial fascination with the relationship between man, nature and art is fruitfully explored in an exhibition entitled Fui, Sarò, Non Sono (I was, I will be, I am not).

Locations count for little in most of Shakespeare's comedies. Only a literal-minded director would, for instance, insist on Messina, Sicily as the setting for Much Ado About Nothing. In Béatrice et Bénédict, on the other hand, Berlioz injects his very odd Bardolatry with lashings of the southern Italian light and atmosphere he loved so much. So turning it all grey as Laurent Pelly does and putting everyone into boxes except the loving enemies who think outside them - get it? - goes against the grain.

The first two of the three in-house opera productions in this year’s Buxton Festival could be bracketed under a slogan of "love stories, Jim – but not quite as we know them". Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi is, of course, Romeo and Juliet … sort of. She comes round in time to sing a duet with Romeo, who is himself a mezzo en travesti, so it’s not Shakespeare. More of that later.

An underage prostitute dies from a drug overdose at a mini “bunga bunga” party with a high-ranking politician. When that’s one of a film’s less shocking moments, you know you’re in for a bumpy ride.

With its steady stream of killings, maimings, kidnap and a frothing-mouthed killer canine, Stefano Sollima’s brutal crime thriller exploring corruption and violence among mafia clans, politicians and even the church in Rome is undeniably vicious and uncompromising. But it’s a beautifully elegant, taut piece of storytelling, too, which unfolds its intertwining threads with almost clockwork precision.Sollima is the creator of Italian TV crime series Romanzo criminale and Gomorrah (itself based on Matteo Garrone’s 2008 movie of the same name). Following 2012’s ACAB – All Cops Are Bastards, Suburra is his second feature, created for the big screen before being turned into a ten-part Netflix TV series.

It’s loosely inspired by fact – the twin standings-down of Silvio Berlusconi and Pope Benedict XVI earlier this decade – and based on the novel co-written by Italian journalist Carlo Bonini and crime writer Giancalo De Cataldo. Its title, close to our present-day “suburb”, refers to a sleazy area of taverns and brothels in Ancient Rome where the rich nobility went to indulge their desires – and to get criminals to do their dirty work. In Sollima’s festering vision of today’s Rome, that rich nobility are replaced by corrupt politicians and powerful clan bosses, who engage warring local low-life gangsters to ensure beachfront Ostia district becomes Italy’s Las Vegas.

To say Suburra revolves around a building development proposal, though (even if it does), robs the film of much of its mood of decadence and impending cataclysm. That’s sometimes rather overplayed in its biblical extravagance, in fact, as Sollima ominously counts down seven days to the “apocalypse” with portentous intertitles, a catastrophe heralded by the rising Tiber threatening to flood the city, the Pope announcing he’s to stand down and the government teetering on the verge of collapse.

But Sollima has assembled a universally strong cast to pick their way through his web of narratives, from rat-like nightclub owner and pimp Sebastiano (an increasingly panic-stricken Elio Germano), drawn reluctantly into murder and kidnap, to swaggering Giacomo Ferrara as young gypsy thug Dagger Anacleti (pictured top with Giulia Gorietti), needling his way into a piece of the action. Claudio Amendola is an unlikely focus of calm nobility as top gang leader Samurai, middle-aged, bespectacled and world-weary, yet ice-cold in his ruthlessness. And Sollima contrasts him beautifully with hot-headed local gangster Number 8 (a snarling Alessandro Borghi, pictured above right with Greta Scarano), intent on proving his worth.

Pierfrancesco Favino is superb as the compromised politician Malgradi (pictured below), a seething mass of contradictions and frustrations after he abandons the overdosed underage hooker he’s entertained for the evening. But ironically it’s one of the film’s minor characters, Number 8’s smack-addict girlfriend Viola (Greta Scarano), who emerges as its unlikely anti-heroine, finally displaying a personal sense of right and wrong rather than clan loyalty.

With its seductive, gawdy lighting and grandiose visions of Roman monuments, Suburra has sumptuous cinematography from Paolo Carnera, even if its squeaky-clean Eternal City – washed eternally clean by endless torrential rain – hardly reflects the grimy goings-on of its underbelly. Sollima constructs some gleefully effective set-pieces, too – a superbly choreographed shootout in a shopping mall, for instance, or even chaotic scenes in the hectic Anacleti household, with hoards of screaming kids playing football among the kitsch objets d’art while the family’s bosses hold court.

Despite its brisk pacing, Suburra is crammed full of detail, none of it extraneous, and ultimately feels all of its two-and-a-bit-hour length. But most memorable of all is Sollima’s cold, matter-of-fact delivery of Suburra’s atrocities, as if he takes a craftsman’s pride in setting in motion a series of unconnected events, then watching as they simply work themselves out towards an inevitable and bloody conclusion.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Suburra