Fighting the Mafia & Renewing Sicilian Culture. Leoluca Orlando

       Prologue

      It was June of 1999 when Palermo finally ceased to be a Third World city—a city of which a French traveler in the previous century justly said that “even the lemon and orange blossoms smell of corpses”—and became a great European city at last.

      I had been predicting this transformation all those years that Palermo was known throughout the world only as the Lebanon of Italy, a shooting gallery for the Mafia where bloody, bullet-riddled bodies littered the streets and women dressed in Sicilian black stared down at the “illustrious corpses” with looks of inexpressible grief. I knew my city well enough to know that someday we would leave this deathscape behind us and reclaim those distinctive Sicilian values—family, friendship, honor—that the Mafia had hijacked during its tenure as our national parasite and degraded into things sinister and malign. But my predictions were discounted because, after all, I was the mayor of Palermo and I had to put a good face on our hideous reality.

      In the 1980s and early 1990s, the body count mounted into the thousands, including such eminent figures as the general in charge of our security forces, the chief of detectives, the chief of police, and two of the most famous magistrates in Europe. According to some estimates, there were more victims than in Palestine or Belfast or the other troubled places that monopolized the world’s attention. So my critics would sometimes snidely ask, “And where is this First World city now, this great European city we have heard so much about?”

      Even in those times of criminal holocaust, I believed that Palermo would eventually choose life, because I believe that human nature is good and God is just. But while I was certain that this transformation would someday come about, I will admit that often during the last two decades—Sicily’s years of living dangerously—I did not believe it would occur in my lifetime. As I walked through Palermo in the summer of 1999, however, I saw a place that was incredibly alive and, even more amazing, quite unafraid. Strolling along the side streets and boulevards, I could see the real Sicily, a land which, far from being a grim embodiment of human evil, has always been a map of human possibility.

      A thousand years ago, the Moors defined Sicily as “the meeting point.” Theirs was essentially a religious definition: they believed that the light of Allah, the light of Prophecy, shone with particular warmth upon them here. But in fact, many cultures met and merged on this island. If I were to say that the Sicilian is Greek, Arab, Spanish and French, in addition to being Italian, I would be speaking truth—but only a piece of it. We never really drove out the many invaders who conquered us through the millennia; we just absorbed them and turned them into Sicilians. Yet ironically, to meet our true identity, we needed finally to take up arms against the one part of us that seemed most intrinsic, but was actually most foreign of all: the Mafia and its culture of death.

      I could cite statistics showing the change that resulted when we did. After all that time during which hundreds were killed every year, for instance, there were just eleven murders in Palermo in 1999, none of them Mafia-related. Yet the real proof that the long siege had finally been lifted was in the quality of life on our streets and in our public places. People congregated in the Vucciria, our traditional street market, and no longer thought twice before entering the Kalsa, the old Arab quarter—both places considered dangerous not long before. Free at last to inhabit their own city, they gathered at rediscovered monuments like Santa Maria dello Spasimo, the sixteenth-century church whose nave, never finished and open to the skies, provided moonlight theater as dramatic as the Baths of Caracalla in Rome.

      Perhaps the one place that encapsulated Palermo’s reemergence as a city of life was the Teatro Massimo. At the time of its opening in 1897, it was one of Europe’s finest opera stages; and from the moment a young tenor named Enrico Caruso sang Ponchielli’s La Gioconda that first season, it became an obligatory stop for the world’s foremost opera singers. In 1974, this great monument was closed for “urgent, immediate repairs” which were supposed to be finished in six months, but stretched out over the next twenty-three years, as most of the many billion lire earmarked by the Italian government for the renovation disappeared—with the complicity of local officials and politicians—into the pockets of contractors linked to Mafia bosses.

      The great opera voices faded into a dim echo of distant grandeur as the Teatro Massimo continued to decay. Its only function was to remind us of the fine civic life that had been stolen from us, and to provide a private parlor for a group that met daily in the basement to socialize and play cards. Nobody appeared to care that Mafiosi regularly mingled there with journalists and professionals.

      Then in 1996, as if to confirm that the plague of illegality and violence was subsiding, renovation work on the Teatro Massimo was at last resumed. Within a year it was refurbished in all its glory, including the gilded frieze that reads, “Art Renews the People and Reveals Their Life.” On the night of the grand reopening, the people of Palermo turned out in the thousands. They were not firstnighters, and they didn’t care whether they got inside or not. It was enough simply to be present as this magnificent building was born again.

      Yet in June 1999, the year Palermo served notice that it had returned to the land of the living, the Teatro Massimo was more than a symbol. It was also the site for opening ceremonies of the international conference of CIVITAS, an international organization dedicated to promoting civic education and the values of freedom. In hosting this conference, Palermo was offering itself as an example to the delegates who came from eighty countries around the world, including places like Russia and Georgia and Rwanda and Uganda, where civil society is more imperiled than it ever was in Sicily during the darkest days of Mafia domination.