Fighting the Mafia & Renewing Sicilian Culture. Leoluca Orlando

      If Imbriaca was our retreat, the place where we lived according to the rhythms that had guided Sicilian life for generations, our regular home was a large building on Via Villafranca in the center of Palermo. Our family had the entire third floor. Below us lived two maiden sisters of my father’s; and below them, another aunt with her husband and their five children. With the seven of us, that made twelve children between the two families, meaning plenty of play-mates without the need to import strangers. We first measured our intelligence, power and daring in the Sicilian way: against blood relatives. Our world was complete—and completely removed from the reality of the city and the vast majority of its inhabitants.

      Our home was beautiful; my mother wouldn’t have allowed anything else. It was serene and full of love. But not necessarily joy. It was difficult to be joyful with our German governess, naturally called Fräulein, who was always present and ready to remind us of the rules and regulations that defined our lives. Fräulein was an elderly, tall, angular woman who uncannily embodied all of my father’s rigorous principles, and perhaps for this reason clashed regularly with my mother. She was not prone to smiles, let alone jokes. But while I frequently thought of the things I would like to do to her as punishment for her tyranny, neither I nor any of my brothers and sisters dared to begin an insurrection. An assault on established order was unthinkable. Instead, we vented our frustration on each other, regularly bickering and fighting. We accepted Fräulein’s right to discipline each of us individually, but never to regulate conflicts among ourselves. We were family, and no matter how much we fought, no one who didn’t share our blood had any right to step between us.

      In any case, the only punishment we truly dreaded was my father’s pointed silence. Father was a large, imposing, self-contained man. But it was his eyes rather than his physical presence that cowed us. His look of disapproval was scorching when he entered the room and found us squabbling. We would all immediately fall silent. Possessing the moral equivalent of x-ray vision, his eyes would indicate who, in his opinion, was in the wrong. Without ever really being reproached, the one subjected to that withering gaze would run to his room, throw himself on his bed and cry. The next step in this ritual was for a brother or sister to quickly follow and offer consolation. The advice was always the same: “Go and apologize.”

      The last words of this stylized drama of guilt and repentance were always the same: “Papa, I was wrong. I beg your pardon.” Whereupon my father’s look immediately became tranquil and soothing. The troublemaker was given a kiss and life returned to normal once again.

      At my father’s insistence, our meals were the perfect expression of our way of life. Punctually at 1:30 P.M. each day we sat down for lunch, and again at exactly 8:30 for dinner—my father at the head of the table, my mother at the foot and we children arrayed always in the same configuration on either side. Our waiter/chauffeur Nino (or Vittorio Emanuele or Giuseppe, as the years passed), wearing white gloves, would serve first my mother, then my father, then each of the children. The meal was always the same: pasta, a main course and fruit. Tasty, plentiful, wholesome food; no appetizer and no dessert, both of which were considered weaknesses. No one was allowed to leave anything on the plate. That would be wasteful, and wastefulness, although we had plenty, was a sin.

      Not going to Mass on Sunday was also a sin. Even more, it was simply inconceivable. We all trooped off to the local parish church every Sunday except at Christmas. This one time each year, the aristocratic side of the family was allowed to express itself and we attended midnight Mass at the Church of the Knights of Malta or the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. My father was himself a Knight of the Holy Sepulcher, a lay religious organization dating back to medieval times with its own age-old rituals, dress and traditions. After midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, we went to a reception in the Palazzo of the Princes of San Vincenzo, the same palazzo where the great Italian director Luchino Visconti filmed the famous ball scene of his film version of The Leopard with Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale. As I realized later when I first read this great novel, we were living in the afterglow of the world Lampedusa had portrayed.

      With religion came many of the traditions that, because they were Sicilian, involved food. I remember the panelle, thin flat triangles made with a paste of chickpea flour and fried in sizzling oil; and the cuccìa, a sweet made with grain, ricotta cheese, sugar and candied fruits. Delicious! These dishes always appeared on the table on December 13, the Feast of St. Lucia, when nothing made with wheat can be eaten—no bread, no pasta, no cake containing wheat flour—because tradition tells the tale that in a terrible year of famine, when all the wheat crop had failed, a boatload of grain arrived in Palermo harbor on the Feast of St. Lucia and such was the hunger of the poor citizens that they boiled it whole and ate it without waiting to grind it into flour. Thus the legend that St. Lucia had intervened miraculously to save Palermo. Today this tradition is still respected and the Palermitans have developed various succulent dishes for this holiday, none of them containing wheat.