Fighting the Mafia and Renewing Sicilian Culture

"Growing up in an aristocratic Palermo family that seems almost to have stepped from the pages of The Leopard, Leoluca Orlando came of age at the exact moment that a new and particularly vicious Mafia sect, centered in the town of Corleone, was making its appearance. Fueled by profits from the international heroin trade, this mafia gangsteristica embarked on a reign of terror that made Sicily into an Italian Lebanon and filled the international press with pictures of bloody bodies - not just those of Mafia rivals of the Corleonesi, but of police and government officials as well.". "Fighting the Mafia is the story of Sicily's Thirty Years War and of the role Orlando played in the Antimafia. Drawn to politics, Orlando became a councilman in Palermo and then the city's mayor. Setting out on an independent course to create a culture of lawfulness, he became part of a triumvirate leading the resistance against Cosa Nostra. Along was Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, he would be marked for death by the Mafia.". "Fighting the Mafia is a tale of witness and survival. Leoluca Orlando's accomplishment is to record the heroic effort to expel the Mafia from the highest levels of Italy's national politics and to describe the movement he helped build - in the schools and churches, and at the ballot box - to recapture Sicilian culture and inspire a renaissance of democracy."--BOOK JACKET.

First sentence: After long treating the concept as taboo, linguists now speculate endlessly about the origins of the word "Mafia."

Year

2001

Language

English

Publisher

Encounter Books

Editions

5

Pages

250

ISBN

9781893554818

Data source: Wikidata