Public services and facilities were rudimentary or absent. Some 40 per cent of the islanders remained illiterate, and what public education there was remained basic in the extreme. Although the state roads, the strade stato – the ones that crossed the island and ran along the northern and southern coasts – were asphalted, the vast majority of the island’s thoroughfares were strade bianche – made of dirt and stone. Outside the cities there were few vehicles; Sicilians depended on donkeys, mules and their own two feet to get around, much as they had always done.
More than half the adult male population was involved in agriculture. Cereals, vegetables, olives, citrus fruits and also almonds as well as wine were all produced on the island, although with tools that had barely changed over the centuries and with the majority wedded to a system that went back to medieval times and beyond. Millennia ago, in the time of the Phoenicians, the land had been divided up into latifundia – effectively, large estates – which were then leased to local notables, who in turn forced locals into slavery, or even brought in slaves from elsewhere, to work the land. It was a system that continued right through the period of Arab rule; then, when the Normans arrived and swept out the Arabs in the tenth century they brought with them their feudal system, which was not so very different from the system of latifundia, except that instead of explicitly being slaves, Sicilian peasants now worked like slaves but at least got to take home some of what they produced, while the barons kept the rest. This baronial class stayed in place even after the Bourbons arrived to rule Sicily. The old latifundia were now known as feudi – large tracts of land of at least 5,000 acres each, of which several might be owned by a single baron. Increasingly, though, the last thing any self-respecting baron wanted to do was spend his time in some godforsaken spot getting baked alive when he could live off the proceeds more comfortably in a large town house in Palermo or Naples – or even Rome or Florence. This meant overseers were needed to keep an eye on things and make sure the share-croppers tending the soil – the contadini – were keeping their side of the bargain. Violence and systematic exploitation were part and parcel of the system.
The feudal system officially ended in 1812, although, as with the switch from latifundia to feudalism, the actual differences were – for the hapless contadini at any rate – rather slight. Instead of answering to armed guards, share-croppers now had to deal with a gabellotto – a kind of steward, who rented the entire feudo and paid the absentee landlord a guaranteed income, while continuing with his henchmen to grind the peasant class into the dust, screwing them for everything they possibly could. Armed revolutions in Sicily in 1820 and in 1848 loosened the power of the old aristocratic baronial class yet further, as did the Risorgimento of 1860, in which the Bourbon dynasty was finally overthrown and Italy became an independent and – notionally, at least – unified state. Yet even though Sicily had been at the centre of Garibaldi’s battle for freedom, the Sicilians, typically, suffered badly from its success, because the island did not fit into a one-nation brand of political rule. Italy may have been the most Catholic country in Europe, but it had more regional dialects and patois than any other, and even after unification remained more of a geographical concept than a nation-state. Not that the central government in Rome accepted this. New taxation laws were introduced along with across-the-board conscription, which prompted outrage among the Sicilians. Theirs was both an agricultural and a highly patriarchal society; men worked on the land, women stayed indoors and tended the home. Conscription meant fields would not be tended and people would starve and die. To avoid it, young men fled to the hills, recruiting officers were lynched and rural Sicily – especially the western half – became ever more lawless as these outlaws evolved into bands of brigands roaming the countryside. Now, Sicilian peasants no longer feared pirates from across the sea, but they did fear being rustled or robbed. Within a couple of decades of the Risorgimento, the murder rate on the island was ten times higher than it was in northern Italy.
It was into this melting pot of poverty, misery and growing violence that the Onorata Società – the Honoured Society – began to emerge as a dominating factor in Sicilian life. At the most basic level, it was a protection racket; but it also had a complex set of codes that revolved around respect, outward devotion to family life and, above all, loyalty. These ‘men of honour’ were also known more simply as the Mafia.
It’s hard to pin down the origins of the word conclusively, although it may well have come from an Arabic word of similar sound that means ‘place of refuge’, as safety, or protection – of a kind – is what the Mafia were offering. On the other hand, in the Palermo patois, mafioso was another word for ‘beautiful’ and ‘self-confident’. So a person described as mafioso came to mean someone attractive and self-assured.
The men of honour were none other than the gabellotti, who, after a period of years looking after the feudi and making money, were starting to acquire enough wealth themselves to invest in land of their own, putting them in a position to turn against the absentee landlord by refusing to pay up, threatening him – or worse, if he did appear on the doorstep – and eventually coercing him into selling up. By this time, the gabellotto had developed into a man of immense local power. He now had land he needed to protect on his own account, and a workforce and subsidiary interests that also needed safeguarding. Protection of the workforce was offered with guarantees and at a price. Those who refused to pay up would be ‘warned’. They might find their olive grove felled or livestock rustled – this was what they could expect if they didn’t have protection. If they still didn’t play ball, then blood would be spilled, often fatally. Bandits would either be paid off or warned off. If a life had to be taken, so be it. The rule of central government counted for nothing in these backwaters of Sicily because everyone, from the police to the politicians to the local parish priest, was in the pocket of the local man of honour.
Gradually, these men of honour began to respect different fiefdoms – there was, after all, some safety in numbers – and so a code began to develop: a code of honour that transcended any normal human loyalties, including those of blood relationship. There were strict lines that no man could cross with impunity. The rules were understood and they were accepted; if they were broken, blood would be shed and dishonour brought down on the perpetrator and sometimes those around him too.
Between the turn of the century and the outbreak of the First World War, in a great exodus fuelled by the Messina earthquake of 1908, some 1.1 million Sicilians – a huge number, amounting to roughly a quarter of the entire population – had emigrated in search of a way out of the grinding oppression and poverty of life on the island. Some went to Britain, France or even South America, but most – around 800,000 – headed to the United States. Yet more left in the 1920s, and among them were many mafiosi, fleeing Fascist clamp-downs. The very notion of having much of central and western Sicily run by a secret organization that was uncontrollable by central government was anathema to Mussolini. He was Il Duce, the dictator, and he was in charge, not some so-called ‘man of honour’.
Determined to stamp out the Mafia once and for all, Mussolini dispatched a hard man, Cesare Mori, to sort it out. Mori, a tough and uncompromising policeman from Pavia in northern Italy, had first been posted to Sicily before the First World War and had made a name for himself for catching the notorious bandit Paolo Grisalfi; he had also used strong-arm tactics against banditry again immediately after the war when still serving on the island. Although he had since retired to Florence, Mussolini now persuaded him to return to duty and posted him back to Sicily as the prefect of Trapani with the sole task of destroying the Sicilian Mafia. ‘Your Excellency has carte blanche,’ Mussolini told him; ‘the authority of the State must be absolutely, I repeat absolutely, re-established in Sicily.8 Should the laws currently in effect hinder you, that will be no problem. We shall make new laws.’ Mori set about his task with an iron fist,