As she spoke, I could see that people like Pino Arlacchi, who had fought the good fight against the Mafia as an Italian citizen and later as deputy secretary general of the United Nations, recognized what a charmed moment this was. Much-abused Palermo was once again the crossroads of the Mediterranean, as it had been in earlier centuries when Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Moors, Normans, and finally Italians came here and left their mark. And the commerce now would not be in heroin and murder, as it had been over the last quarter-century, but in ideas about how cities and cultures are renewed.
The delegates from CIVITAS and the tens of thousands of other tourists crowding Palermo during these summer days were of course aware of our grim history. It was not hard to find vestiges of that other Palermo, the one called, as early as the 1765 edition of Diderot’s Encyclopedie, a ville destruite—a city destroyed by repeated invasion during the nineteenth century; by the Allied bombardment in World War II; and most of all by the Mafia building program aptly named the “Sack of Palermo,” which turned a grand city that had survived so much and still managed to remain beautiful into something ugly and haggard.
Palermo had been destroyed most of all by murder, particularly the murder of those who had tried to save the city from itself. There had been many fallen heroes over the years, the death of each one depleting Palermo a little more of its hope and will. When General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, who had become famous for subduing the Red Brigades, was gunned down in Palermo in 1982, the city’s newspapers showed his bloody body, with that of his lovely young wife beside him, under the headline: “Here dies the hope of honest Palermitans.” And then in 1992, hope died again when Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, courageous magistrates who had brought the Mafia to judgment in an internationally celebrated trial, were blown up by car bombs, actions which for a few weeks seemed to mark the beginning of a coup against the government of Rome as well as Sicily, and against the very concept of human decency.
But even in our darkest hour, although we didn’t know it then, a new life was stirring. One sign was in the hand-lettered placard that went up after the double martyrdom of Falcone and Borsellino: “Today begins a dawn that will see no sunset.” And by the summer of 1999, the sun was shining brightly indeed.
There was the wonder of being normal—for instance, being normally curious about the doings of the First Lady and her entourage of over a hundred, who had taken over the stately Villa Igiea hotel, once the personal residence of a Sicilian family that made a vast fortune in tuna fishing at the turn of the century. And about what Chelsea Clinton was doing when she went out night-clubbing, together with my daughter Leila, in parts of the city that a few years earlier would have been off limits for any decent young woman, let alone the daughter of a president. How far we had progressed was clear when I took some CIVITAS delegates to Corleone, birthplace of the bloodthirsty sect that had destroyed the “old” Mafia in a struggle for power that claimed over a thousand victims. The streets we walked were now beginning to look like a museum of crimes past. At the town hall we had a public discussion of the Corleonesi’s mafia gangsteristica, which had terrorized Palermo and indeed all of Sicily. A short time earlier, this would have been an act of bravado swiftly punished; but now it was simply a tour of a dead past whose criminals eventually choked on the blood they shed.
What was the lesson I drew from our recent history? the CIVITAS delegates asked. I replied that our struggle showed that the law court is only one front in the campaign against violence and lawlessness. The other is culture. An image that occurred to me early in my own fight against the Mafia was of a cart with two wheels, one law enforcement and the other culture. If one wheel turned without the other, the cart would go in circles. If both turned together, the cart would go forward.
So, at the same time as brave lawmen and prosecutors were dying in order to establish a rule of law, we were trying to rebuild our civic life: repossessing symbols like the Teatro Massimo; taking back our politics after a generation of collusion; and perhaps most important, reclaiming our children and their future. Along with our public places, the Mafia had taken over our educational system—not only because it knew that maintaining ignorance among the people was the key to its power, but also because there was money to be made. We stopped renting school space from Mafia front men and women. We began to implement an antimafia curriculum. One of the children’s art pieces shown to Hillary Clinton when she toured our city depicted children holding hands around a criminal with a gun, isolated within their circle.
We also began to work with the children in the “Adopt a Monument” program. In the average American or European city, even a run-down one, such an effort would have been simply a modest attempt at social uplift. In Palermo it was a revolutionary break with the past, because the Mafia, like any totalitarian force, gets its power largely by stifling cultural memory and civic identity. In the last few years, some 25,000 students have adopted over 160 monuments in Palermo: churches with murals to be uncovered; public offices of earlier centuries to be painted and brought back into service; parks to be made green and blooming again. As they demanded that the dirt be removed from these monuments, our children knew their work was a metaphor for cleansing the spiritual grime deposited by years of criminal rule.
I told the delegates of CIVITAS that the chief lesson of the Palermo renaissance was that while it is possible to lose momentum or even slip backward in the political/legal realm—as evident in the moral stammering that has defined the Italian government’s response to the Mafia—there is no backtracking in the civic realm. People who have known freedom will not willingly go back to degraded collective lives. They will not unsay words like “Mafia” once they have been said. They will not become stupid about democracy once they have experienced it. They will not again surrender the monuments and public places that show where they came from and define who they are.
As Paolo Borsellino, the courageous magistrate and my old friend who died for this new Palermo, once said, “The solution to the problem of the Mafia is to make the state work.” This is partly a matter of justice and the rule of law. It is also a question of meeting human needs in the civic realm, from the need for jobs that don’t involve collusion with a criminal conspiracy, to the need for democracy and a culture of freedom.
During the summer of 1999, when I looked at my city as if with new eyes, I also looked at myself and, as I often have over the past few years, felt amazed to be alive. For many years—a longer time than I care to remember—I was a marked man. The question was not whether I would be killed, but when and how. In a special it did on me, England’s Channel Four called me “the Walking Corpse.” And that is how I felt. I experienced death vicariously every day. But then, as the people of Palermo began to enter their new dawn, I had a sudden thought: “Good Lord, I might actually live!” How would I spend this extra life I had been granted? The answer was easy: making this city great again.
I still have a dozen bodyguards, and we all move in armored cars. I still instinctively duck when I hear a backfire and look nervously over my shoulder. I know that the Mafia is still out there, haunting the Sicilian sleep. Yet although the stake has not yet been driven through its heart, the organization is dead. It died the minute it was expelled from the political system where it had come to dwell during its long sojourn in our national life. The Mafia no longer rules us. It is outside our local government now. Palermo is no longer a pariah among cities. When Moody International Certification recently gave us one of its highest issuer ratings, Aa3, the same as Stockholm and Barcelona and higher than New York, it thereby announced that the changes in Palermo over the previous few years were structural and profound, fully warranting that sign of confidence.
For a city that has lived in the shadows to come out into the sunlight again is a miracle. Yet this miracle has not been without