From novelist Robert Ferrigno:

i was taken today by Derb’s talk of the italian concept of a “good death”….like all of my books…[The Wake Up] features a major character experiencing this good death. i had never thought of this as being particularly italian, but i suspect the Derb is on to something, and it’s clearly something our culture could use a reminder of. the greatest damage that the cult of celebrity has done is to diminish the concept of the hero, one which every other culture in history has used to make life more meaningful. by focusing on transitory people utterly lacking in what christopher marlowe called virtu we have debased ourselves, and made our culture vulnerable to people who, regardless of their moral deficiencies, are imbued with a sense of destiny, and a mission that transcends self.