Roberto Saviano

His ten planets divide four in air, with two each in fire, earth and water. Air is the element that stands outside a situation and describes exactly what it is, which for a journalist is not a temperament but the entire job. Saviano has lived under police protection since writing a book about organised crime in Naples, so the describing had a cost attached that most reporting does not carry.

Four planets group inside twelve degrees of Libra: the Moon, Mercury, Venus and Pluto, with Mercury sitting conjunct Venus two hundredths of a degree off exact. Libra is the sign of the other person and of what is acceptable between people, and having speech and taste welded together inside it describes a writer whose prose is deliberately beautiful about something ugly. Pluto in the same group supplies the subject matter.

The Sun sits on the twenty ninth degree of Virgo, the last of the sign, almost over the line into that Libra group. Virgo is the sign of the exact detail and the correction nobody thanks you for, which is what investigative reporting consists of before any of it is published. Not one of the ten planets was retrograde at his birth, so nothing in this chart was ever holding anything back for review.

Jupiter closed its circuit back in Leo on 4 August 2015, at thirty five. Leo asks how much of a thing was seen rather than how far it travelled, which is an uncomfortable measure for somebody whose visibility is the reason he cannot move freely. Three circuits precede it, and the book that made him both widely read and permanently guarded sits inside the second. Having four planets in the sign of the other person, in a man who cannot safely be among them, is the cruellest arrangement in this set.