Fighting the Mafia & Renewing Sicilian Culture. Leoluca Orlando
headquarters to claim my prize. After a long wait, I was finally received by one of the editors. As I explained who I was, he got the look on his face of someone suddenly forced to converse with an extraterrestrial. It was 1965, a high point in the Cold War, and here was a Gonzaghino produced by the Jesuits, sworn enemies of the Communists, trying to collect a free trip to the motherland!
“You can’t participate,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because you come from a private school.”
“Whether I studied at a private school or studied in Timbuktu has nothing to do with it. I sat for the exams in front of a public commission, just like everybody else! You promised a trip for the highest score. I got it.”
A look combining boredom and triumph came over his face: “I’m sorry, but we can’t permit a pupil from a private school—and a religious one at that—to go to Moscow.”
The trip went to Salvino Mazzamuto, the boy whose score was just below mine. He had attended a public school and was an activist in the young Communist movement, and he would later become a good friend of mine.
This episode had an odd effect on me. At first I felt a keen sense of injustice. But then, as that emotion receded, I began to wonder if the contempt I had seen in the eyes of the editor of L’Ora might somehow be justified. It was true that my social world thus far had been bounded by the walls of my family’s palazzo in Palermo and our villas in the country and at the seaside, and by the walls holding in my companions and me at Gonzaga—all of us rich, Catholic Daddy’s boys. What was the relationship of the real world to the world of my experience? To annual rites like the Carnival parties I attended as a little boy, dressed as Aladdin or Pinocchio, in the beautiful frescoed rooms of Palazzo Ziino (the Ziinos being great friends of my family), along with all the other little Aladdins and Pinocchios from “nice” families? Or the Christmas receptions in Palazzo San Vincenzo, whose magnificent rooms were filled with the cream of Palermo’s aristocracy? No wonder others regarded me as a member of a strange species!
The perplexity these thoughts caused me was increased by another encounter I had that summer of 1965. One day a school-mate and friend named Nanni came to pick me up to go with him to San Martino, a beautiful place in the hills above Palermo. He’d had an argument with another boy named Marco Lupo and wanted me to help him get even. By the time we got to San Martino, however, I knew that this minor argument was not the real reason for the trip. In fact, Nanni was interested in a girl named Valeria, who was staying with Marco Lupo’s family. When we arrived, Valeria came out to talk to us. With her was her friend Milli, Marco Lupo’s sister. Milli’s dark hair was tied in two little pigtails, emphasizing a small, pretty face that reminded me of a frightened bunny. Because my score on the Maturità exam had made me locally famous, Milli immediately asked my opinion on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. And I, to my shame, was all too willing to give it to her.
We walked under the pine trees of San Martino, drinking in the resin-perfumed air, talking philosophy until we were invited up to the villa for cake. The house actually didn’t belong to the Lupos; they had rented it while they were building their own villa. But it struck me as being very different from the houses I had always known. It was a house filled not only with jokes and laughter, but with real joy. It made me realize the extent to which the homes I had lived in had been beautiful, serene, and happy, yet never joyous. In this exciting house, the conversation leaped from philosophy to cinema to history to music as we ate our cake.
Very soon after this I traveled to London to study English for a month. One day the phone rang. It was Milli, who was staying in London too and had gotten my number from Nanni. Over the next few weeks, we explored the Tate Gallery, the British Museum, the Tower of London, the Victoria and Albert Museum. We walked in the parks. We went to the theater. We saw My Fair Lady and came out humming the tunes together. Milli’s chief appeal was her normality. I was in love with it and with her. I always saw Milli home on the tube train—she lived in Watford, the last station on the Bakerloo line—and then returned in a state of euphoria to Finchley Street, where I lived in a huge house converted into a student hostel.
Milli’s stay in London was over before mine, and on the night of her departure, I took her to a roaring party the Young Conservatives were throwing at Heathrow Airport and then put her on the plane. As a parting gift she gave me The Charterhouse of Parma. The next day I started feeling bad—so bad, in fact, that a few days later I ended up in Paddington Hospital. I had pneumonia, for the second time in my life. I called my parents, knowing they would be worried if they didn’t hear from me for a long time, and I told them I would be away on a brief trip.
Was it the quality of my voice? Had my tone been too breezily nonchalant? Or was it some kind of sixth sense? Whatever it was that gave me away, my father and mother arrived at Paddington Hospital that very evening and immediately moved me to a private clinic, the Italian Hospital in Queen’s Square, where I battled my illness for the next three weeks with my parents at my bedside, as I feverishly followed the fortunes of Stendhal’s Fabrizio.
It was autumn when I returned to Palermo, just in time to register for the university. Since I had no particular preference of field and a test I had taken indicated that I was “qualified for all faculties,” I followed the Orlando family tradition and decided to study law.
I also picked up my relationship with Milli, who had taken it upon herself to “normalize” me. People in the aristocratic world where I had lived shed easy tears over the starving children in Biafra, but knew nothing—or chose to know nothing—of the everyday tragedies of life among the underclass of Palermo. Through Milli I discovered that there were poor people and social outcasts in my own city. My first impulse, given my upbringing, was to pay someone to help them. Milli did the helping herself, and made nothing of her charitable acts. She was the sort of person who wrote to the Pope telling him that the Church should do more for the poor. Writing the Pope! Unthinkable! She also taught me to swim—I who had spent two months of every summer of my life in a magnificent villa at the seaside, and was afraid of the water.
In 1968, after the earthquake in Sicily’s Belice Valley killed hundreds and left thousands homeless, I took a truckload of clothes and other necessities to the disaster area as part of an effort organized by an association of former Gonzaga students. I didn’t get close to the victims, but like others of my class, I could congratulate myself for having done what in the United States would be called “feel-good” work. But Milli was actively involved. She took me to meet a family who had lost both their home and their small shop. They had five children but couldn’t support them any longer. Out of desperation they had decided to go to Germany as “guest workers,” taking their oldest son with them. The other four children, aged from one to eight, they gave to Milli and me to keep. For the next three years, after settling the children in various homes, we acted as parents, looking after their material and emotional needs. When their parents had finally saved enough money to return to Sicily, it was Milli and I who introduced them to their youngest child, who no longer remembered them.
I never would have undertaken the fight against the Mafia just for the sake of law and order. I fought because I knew how the tentacles of the Mafia strangled the lives of common people. And I learned to care about these people in the first place because Milli opened my eyes to them.
I was the fourth generation of Orlandos to study law, but the first Orlando to do so at a school where his father was not only a professor but also the dean. This led to an awkward situation. Like most other major Italian universities in 1968 and 1969, Palermo was occupied by student protestors, and I was involved in this movement, but was regarded with suspicion by my comrades. After all, I was the son of the dean. What my companions could in no way even vaguely imagine was the uncomfortable, almost surreal atmosphere at home when I sat down to our meals, perhaps coming there directly from a tumultuous demonstration. There I was, being served by Giuseppe in his white jacket and gloves, sitting beside my father whose building I had been