USA TODAY International Edition
In Sicily, the Mafia is losing its muscle
Palermo comes to terms with its bloody past — through tourism
A Pax Mafiosa has settled over Sicily.
Sicilians are defying the Mafia in a movement fueled by the generation that came of age in the 1980s, when waves of bloody public assassinations of prosecutors, police and a priest paralyzed the island.
And now, in and around Sicily’s main city of Palermo, guides from Addiopizzo, a group of young activists, show tourists vivid evidence of the Cosa Nostra’s brutal stranglehold and the new resistance.
Addiopizzo (“Goodbye Pizzo”) was started in 2004 by a handful of college grads who wanted to open a bar and realized they would have to pay pizzo to the rackets — protection money that 80% of business owners purportedly still pay today to avoid Mafia harassment. Instead, they brazenly plastered Palermo with inyour- face stickers declaring: “A people that pays pizzo is a people without dignity.”
For local merchants, fighting pizzo was a key first step. “By paying the pizzo, shopkeepers accept the Mafia’s authority and sovereignty over their area,” says Edoardo Zuffato, a co- founder of Addiopizzo. Today, more than 800 shops are members of Addiopizzo, displaying window decals declaring they won’t knuckle under, and more than 10,000 citizens of Palermo have agreed not to shop where pizzo is paid.
Such efforts are a highlight of Addiopizzo’s unusual walking tours of Palermo. Tours are offered every Saturday and, on request, can include private tours to Corleone, home of the notorious Riina and Provenzano families. My husband, Dave, and I chose the Palermo tour as a great introduction to Sicily today and a unique balance to our visits to the ancient Greek, Roman and Norman monuments of the island’s 9,000 years of history.
We met our young guide, Flavia Arato, at one of Palermo’s most famous restaurants, Antica Focacceria San Francesco, named for the medieval church across the piazza. Once it was a hangout of notorious Mafia boss Lucky Luciano. Today, owner Fabio Conticello, a prominent Palermitan, displays his Addiopizzo window decal. He was among the first to defy the Mafia, after having endured harassment that included superglue in the door locks, vandalism to customers’ cars and sabotage in his kitchen by Mafiosi he had been forced to hire. When Conticello went to the police and later faced down the Mafia at a trial, Addiopizzo stood with him, as they have for about 130 others over the last decade.
As Flavia began our tour by fill- ing us in on Mafia history, we eat an assortment of savory Sicilian street foods — arancini ( fried rice balls), panelle ( chickpea fritters), cazilli ( potato fritters) and eggplant roulade, though we pass on its hugely popular pane de la milza, a veal spleen sandwich dished out to a line of lunch customers. We top off our snacks with dreamy cannoli for dessert, all included in the 30 euro ( about $ 33) walking- tour price.
After lunch, we wend our way for another three hours through the medieval streets and markets of chaotic Palermo, keeping up a lively conversation with Flavia, whose passion for her city and her cause is exhilarating.
As we head up Palermo’s hill away from its harbor, the story of the Mafia’s grip unfolds.
Passing a pile of concrete, not much more than chunks — still inhabited by squatters even after the house was destroyed 72 years ago by Allied bombs — we learn that Sicily’s postwar politicians handed construction over to the Mafia, leaving it to their discretion what should be rebuilt and how. The result: vast fortunes for the Mafia and a landscape of shoddy, ugly buildings, a chief annoyance to Palermo’s young professionals who now spearhead the resistance.
We pass a small coffee shop owned by another early Addiopizzo merchant, Lucio Gionti, who inspired others by tossing out onto the street the slot machine the Mafia had installed in his shop. I ask him whether his stand has brought him trouble. He smiles and shrugs and says no. He says the Addiopizzo window decal tells customers he is “a good man.”
The Mafia is said to believe that bothering Addiopizzo shop owners would be a net negative — the bad publicity and increased police scrutiny would be worse than the lost pizzo money. It wasn’t always true. In 2007, Salvatore Lo Piccolo, sometimes called the Boss of all Bosses, torched a paint warehouse whose owner had refused many pizzo demands. The boss and his henchmen are in jail, and the state replaced the factory.
Just a block further up the main street, we reach Palermo’s 12thcentury Norman Cathedral, built on the site where a mosque once stood in the 9th century. Flavia points across the piazza to an enormous pink wooden boat, a float that sits all year until it is drawn through the streets on Santa Rosalia Day, the largest celebration in Palermo, for its patron saint. In 2012, Addiopizzo members paraded alongside the float to huge applause, which was taken as a sign of wide public support and legitimacy.
At the cathedral, we discuss the complicated relationship between the Cosa Nostra and the church. During the Cold War, they were united against Communism. But the very public massacres of anti- Mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992 were a turning point, not just among the people of Sicily but also with the church. A year later, crusading priest Guiseppe Puglisi, who was beatified recently by Pope Francis, was murdered at his church. Soon after that, Pope John Paul became the first pontiff to speak out against the Mafia when he went to Sicily to declare that Mafiosi must repent.
Just beyond the cathedral, we enter a narrow alley that opens into one of Palermo’s famous street markets, the Capo. As we thread between stalls spilling mounds of artichokes and tomatoes and fennel on one side, and tubs of squid and every variety of colorful mollusks on the opposite, Flavia tells us that the vendors are shaken down for protection money under the guise of fake lottery games that have no winner.
We soon reach our final stop, just off the Capo: Palermo’s official anti- Mafia statement in concrete, a long plaza in front of the courts building. The Piazza of Memory has 11 columns, each memorializing one of the prosecutors or judges murdered over the years. We sit on a marble bench with Flavia, summing up all we had learned about Sicily’s bloody past, and today’s gutsy resistance.