Will Amanda Knox be freed this week? Its annual jazz and chocolate festivals, and a university that attracts thousands of overseas students in search of la dolce vita, lend it – in the warm months at least – a benevolent, holiday atmosphere.
It is an unlikely place for murder.
But beyond the museums, medieval palazzi and sun-dappled piazzas lies a dark underbelly.
The walled historic centre is undeniably attractive but it is ringed by a grimy industrial and suburban sprawl populated by struggling immigrants and a legion of drug-pushers who sell their wares to foreign students intent on making the most of what is, for many of them, their first time away from home.
It was this, the seamier side of Perugia, that Italian prosecutors invoked when they accused Amanda Knox and her Italian boyfriend of a few days, the boyish-looking Raffaele Sollecito, of murdering 21-year-old Meredith Kercher in cold blood in Nov 2007 in what they said was a sex game stoked by drugs and black magic that went horrifically awry.
Now, nearly four years after the crime, Knox, 24, and her ex-lover, 26, are within days of finding out whether they will spend the next two decades in jail, or have their murder convictions overturned and their liberty restored.
They were convicted of murder and sexual assault in 2009. Knox was sentenced to 26 years in prison while Sollecito received a 25 year sentence. They both appealed, as is customary under Italian law.
Their appeals have ground on for the last 10 months, often with just one hearing a week, sometimes none, and with a lengthy summer adjournment, when, like the rest of Italy, judges, prosecutors and prison guards packed up and headed for the beach.
Now, finally, comes the moment of reckoning.
The prosecution will sum up its case on Friday and Saturday, all parties will then be given a chance to offer rebuttals to the evidence presented by their opponents, and a verdict will be handed down by two judges and six jurors. It is expected on Sept 30 or Oct 1, although like almost everything in this extraordinary saga, nothing is certain.
In fact much of the press corps divided into two camps – the “innocentisti”, who firmly believed that Knox had nothing to do with the killing and was the victim of a monstrous injustice and trans-Atlantic cultural misunderstanding, and the “colpevolisti”, who saw her as a sly dissembler trying to wriggle out of a crime she not only committed but orchestrated.
I never quite believed that Knox was the wide-eyed innocent abroad that her supporters made her out to be; there were just too many odd things about her account of what happened that night.
But equally I was sure that had the trial been held in the UK, the evidence presented would never have secured her conviction.
The prosecutors’ initial contention, that the murder was inspired by Halloween rituals and the occult, always struck me as ludicrous, as it did most journalists.
But the endless twists and turns of the story proved as captivating to the public as they were to us.
The crime spawned an entire blogosphere, with online commentators trading furious insults as they championed Knox or Kercher.
It was not hard to see the appeal of the saga.
The two women at the heart of the saga were young and good-looking: the blue-eyed Knox, whose nickname Foxy Knoxy rang with sexual overtones even though her family insisted that she earned it because she was a cunning football player; and Meredith Kercher, from Coulsdon in Surrey, whose mixed-race good looks came from her English father, John, and her mother Arline, who was born in Lahore when it was part of British India.
“If either of them had looked like the back end of a bus, we wouldn’t be here,” one journalist remarked at the start of the trial. It may have been a crude observation, but it was also correct.
The idea that an attractive young woman could commit sexual assault and murder has proved titillating through the ages.
Thanks to the prodigious leaking of her diaries, Knox was portrayed as a sexually-precocious vamp, described by one prosecution lawyer during the trial as a treacherous “she-devil” obsessed with sex, drugs and “living life on the edge”.
Her eccentric behaviour did not help her case – she did cartwheels in a police station before being questioned about the discovery of her flat-mate’s body and went shopping for sexy lingerie with her boyfriend in the days after the murder.
The two young men accused of killing Miss Kercher along with Knox were also photogenic – Sollecito, with his clean-cut good looks and Harry Potter glasses, and Rudy Guede, born in Ivory Coast and brought to Italy as a child by his immigrant father, who later abandoned him and left him in the care of a wealthy Italian family.
He was found guilty of murder in a separate, fast-track trial and was sentenced to 30 years in prison, which was reduced on appeal to 16 years.
Knox’s supporters say it was he, and he alone, who killed Miss Kercher, and there is plenty of DNA as well as circumstantial evidence to back them up.
The real-life whodunit was played out against the backdrop of an historic hill town that could have come straight out of Under the Tuscan Sun.
The setting was complemented by a colourful cast of characters that would not have looked out of place in a pulp fiction crime novel.
There was the bearish, balding chief prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, who had been controversially involved in the hunt for a sadistic serial killer nicknamed the Monster of Florence in neighbouring Tuscany.
There was Monica Napoleoni, the head of the murder squad in Perugia, whose year-round tan, raven-black hair, skin-tight leather trousers and knee-length boots seemed more suited to a cat walk than a crime scene.
Her female sidekick, by contrast, was formidably beefy and resembled an East German shot-putter.
Blue-bereted prison guards, who flanked Knox and Sollecito when they entered and left the courtroom, openly answered their mobile phones even when witnesses were in full flight.
The judge who presided over the trial, Giancarlo Massei, was nicknamed by journalists ‘Woody Allen’ for his quick, nervous manner and passing resemblance to the American director.
All in all, it was enough to spawn an American made-for-TV movie about the case, “Amanda Knox – Murder on Trial in Italy”, plans for a British film starring Colin Firth and nine books in Italian and English, with a tenth due to be published in the new year.
The murder also tapped into the barely-suppressed angst of the millions of middle-class families in Britain and the US who send their offspring on a gap year and pray they won’t get into trouble.
What happened to Miss Kercher – found half-naked, with her throat slit, in a pool of her own blood – was every parent’s worst nightmare.
The endless inconsistencies and contradictions in the alibis given by Knox and her boyfriend made armchair detectives of even the most casual reader.
If the American was really innocent, why did she tell police (in a ‘confession’ at the end of a an all-night interrogation that has been strongly contested by her lawyers) that she was at the scene of the crime and that she heard the Leeds University student scream in agony?
Why was Sollecito not able to back up her alibi that she spent the night with him, making love, listening to music and downloading movies on a computer?
Why did she falsely accuse an innocent man, a Congolese bar owner named Patrick Lumumba, of being the probable killer?
Was a break-in at the hillside cottage shared by Kercher and Knox and two Italian women, in which a high window was smashed and clothes and other items ransacked, really staged?
The incompetence of Italian police and forensic investigators played into in-built American and British prejudices about Mediterranean muddling.
A strap which was cut off Miss Kercher’s bra, which turned out to be a crucial piece of evidence, was kicked around the crime scene for weeks before it was belatedly found by investigators.
Forensic officers picked up bits of evidence from the floor of Miss Kercher’s room using dirty gloves, failed to wear face masks and ran roughshod over crime scene protocols.
The Keystone Cops element was even echoed in the court room when the trial got underway. On the first day, it was so packed with journalists and camera crews that some enterprising reporters crammed into the metal cages normally reserved for dangerous prisoners.
It took 15 minutes of extravagant arm-raising and shouting between the judge, prosecutors and defence lawyers to eject them.
The shambolic nature of the investigation ensured that deep flaws emerged in the prosecution case when it was scrutinised by two independent forensic experts during the appeal.
In a 145-page report, Carla Vecchiotti and her colleague Stefano Conti, both from La Sapienza University in Rome, ruled that traces of DNA found on the presumed murder weapon, a long, black-handled kitchen knife, were so low that they could not be attributed with certainty to Miss Kercher.
The knife is one of the key pieces of evidence because it apparently links Knox to the crime – the American’s DNA was found on the handle.
The experts also said that the bra strap, which prosecutors said bore DNA material from Sollecito and so connected him to the murder, was not found by police until 46 days after the murder, by which time it had probably been kicked across the floor and was therefore contaminated evidence.
All of which has given Knox and her long-suffering, ever-loyal family, reason to believe that she could walk free from at the end of the month.
The vagaries of the Italian judicial system, which to British and American eyes can seem eccentric verging on the dysfunctional, also favour her and her former boyfriend.
“Fifty per cent of criminal cases in Italy are change in some way at the appellate level,” said Barbie Latza Nadeau, the author of Angel Face – The True Story of Student Killer Amanda Knox, who has attended every hearing in the case. “So she has a better than good chance, at least of a reduction in sentence.”
The two judges in the appeal have several options open to them. They could uphold the original convictions and sentences – that is thought to be unlikely but it could happen, and the judges even have it within their power to increase the sentences to life, or 30 years, as prosecutors have requested.
They could completely overturn the convictions and set Knox and Sollecito free, in which case the American is likely to be whisked out of Italy and back to her native Seattle on the first available flight, preferably without the media’s knowledge.
Or they could rule that a lesser crime had been committed – aiding and abetting the murder, perhaps – but drastically reduce the sentence and ensure that the couple are freed, if not immediately, then within a few months, taking into consideration the time they have already served behind bars.
The latter would be a face-saving exercise that might satisfy Italian honour and the wishes of Knox’s family, but would dismay Miss Kercher’s parents, two brothers and sister.
“Overturning the conviction is about much more than the fate of Amanda and Raffaele. It would be a reflection on the Italian justice system in the eyes of the world,” said Miss Nadeau.
“If they are let go, a lot of Italians will think their country buckled under American pressure. “If they stay in jail, some Americans will continue to see a gross miscarriage of justice by an unfair, antiquated judicial system.”
Even if the convictions are overturned, the story does not end there – prosecutors will lodge an appeal of their own, bumping the case up to the Supreme Court in Rome, the highest in the land. It could be another year or more for it to be definitively resolved.
And the rest of the world will be left ruminating on the fact that for all its gorgeous art and architecture and food, getting into trouble with the law in Italy, particularly if you are innocent, is inadvisable in the extreme.
