It’s a rough awakening in the aftermath of the previous season’s tragic finale at Sangue Blu and his associates’ yacht party. Genny has survived everything and everybody, the “Immortale” included, but something inside him has come undone: without his brotherly friend to look after him he is no longer sure he can keep it all together.

One thing Genny does know, though: Ciro has given his life so that he might spend his own together with Azzurra and their little kid Pietro, and that’s too good a gift to be wasted. Which is exactly what is now likely to happen, what with Sangue Blu having taken back his grandfather’s kingdom, and the Capaccio crew making their moves on the Secondigliano turf: now more than ever, Naples seems on the verge of a new season of fighting and bloodshed.

The only remaining option for Genny, if he is to reinstate a balance of powers and avert all-out warfare, is to bring in a new player, along with his full economic and military weight, to hold a central position on the map of gangland power. While Gomorrah’s third season had seen the boundaries shift towards the historic neighbourhoods of central Naples, the fourth now brings us to the countryside, in the region north of the city, where another organized crime family is thriving – and it’s an altogether different lot from all other crews we’ve come across in the series so far.

We’re thus introduced to the Levante family, whose patriarch Gerlando rules over the vast, poisoned rural areas undisturbed, keeping his greedy fingers in all kinds of pies: criminal and institutional activities across the board, from drug trafficking to public tender procedures, and from waste management down to the rotten heart of local politics.

As things seem to roll according to plan, Genny feels increasingly free to reinvent himself, hiding his tattoos under stylish bespoke suits, surrounded by his perfect family in a posh Posillipo villa. Gennaro Savastano is on course to turn into a textbook entrepreneur, with a dream of setting up an entirely different legacy for his son that the one Don Pietro left behind for him.

And yet in this season nothing is what is seems on the surface. It’s all but impossible to get away from one’s roots completely, all the more so when it’s from those same roots that one draws the foundation for one’s dreams of legit success. Indeed, Genny’s old and new lives are linked by an invisible thread that ties him to Patrizia, who in the meantime has taken Secondigliano’s throne. It’s business as usual: all good, and all ready to go haywire at a moment’s notice. In fact, at the first sign of weakness from Secondigliano’s new regent queen’s, all crews – the Levantes and Capaccios as well as Sangue Blu – show their true colours as the pack of wolves they are, all too ready to jump at each other’s throats.

And yes, all-out war it is then. For one and all. A war that shakes Genny’s newfangled balance of power to its fragile foundations. As he tries to deal with the full weight of his family name in building a different future in business, all the major Naples crime families seem to engage in a tangle of secret alliances, plots, spying and backstabbing. Which will finally make Genny understand why his father Pietro had made a decision many year before: to keep the Levante family out of any business on his North Naples turf.