The weather reports in Italy have often cried wolf, with alarming “Severe Thunderstorm Warnings” resulting in little more than a sprinkle. On this morning, though, the forecast’s bite was every bit as bad as its bark, with a relentless downpour waking me early and carrying on for hours. A lull conveniently lined up with my intended departure time, and I set forth smiling, pleased to have once again dodged a drenching. Five minutes later, still within the bounds of Santo Stefano, I was squeezed beneath an awning, as thunder boomed immediately overhead. I remained in that position for nearly a half-hour.
With resignation, I finally accepted what should have already been obvious. The planned route–climbing over the mountains, through Palazzo Adriano, en route to Prizzi–was completely impracticable and even dangerous. For all my stubbornness, I try not to cross the line into foolhardiness; unfortunately, given the geography, there wasn’t a great road option that would still accommodate the inclusion of Palazzo Adriano, famous as the setting of Cinema Paradiso. I would have to sacrifice it, in order to follow the highway to Prizzi.
All things considered, that was a most modest price to pay in Sicily, an island of martyrs, where many have paid something far more definitive, something everlasting.
When the deluge permitted, I scanned the surrounding countryside as I squelched along waterlogged roads, largely car-free on this miserable Sunday morning. Mountain peaks loomed to my left, while craggy hilltops peppered the landscape to my right, and beneath all of that zigzagged different parcels of land, some green and lush, but most freshly plowed in lined rows. Most of Sicily continues to be dedicated to agriculture, as it has since Rome formalized that colonial system more than two millennia past. And yet, one of the recurring narratives in Sicily is one of hunger, of the masses yearning for–and demanding–full bellies and sufficient nutrition.
Often, those calls for the most basic human necessities have been met with violence. Those stories have followed me along my walk. In Randazzo, where I transitioned from the Via Normanna to the Fabaria, a crowd gathered on July 25, 1920, to protest a grain shortage that was leaving the town’s most vulnerable on the brink of starvation. In the wake of World War I, peasants had risen up across Sicily, and those in power were fed up. When a conflict broke out in the midst of the protest in Town Hall, a group of Carabinieri opened fire, killing seven and injuring dozens.
Further along the Fabaria, in Grammichele, the hexagon-shaped town near Caltagirone, bloodshed erupted 15 years earlier, on August 16, 1905. A coalition of peasant leagues and mutual aid societies marched on the city center, at which point a small group split off and set fire to the Casino dei Civili, hoping to burn the tax bills, which exemplified their exploitation. The police once again opened fire, killing six and injuring seventy.
Palermo, of course, has been a hotbed of protest and peasant activism over the years, and this rose to a crescendo late in World War II. The people had endured so much, first under fascist occupation and then during Allied liberation. Even still, the harvest continued, unabated, but that food wasn’t used to feed Sicilians–it was given over to troops. And by 1944, there was nothing left in Palermo. As starving citizens marched into the center, gathering near Palazzo Comitini, the Italian army fired on the crowd, shooting shotguns and hurling hand grenades, killing 24, including a 9-year-old.
Time and again, Sicilians have been relegated to second-class citizens on their own island, watching their agricultural wealth disappear, leaving only scraps behind, and those who have resisted, who have demanded change, have often borne the brunt of a brutal response.
I would like to say that this historical perspective enabled me to bear my own bad food luck with greater equanimity and dignity in Prizzi, but there was still some sulking involved. The beautiful town, its narrow rows of buildings packed tightly onto the south side of a large hill, was nearly completely shut down on this wet Sunday. I swept into a fruit stand the moment I arrived, knowing it would soon close for the day, and I bought a pair of bananas and a jar of pesto, but somehow there were no pasta noodles to be purchased anywhere in town. A pizzeria was supposed to be open, but its doors were locked all day. A trattoria was an option, but the prices went well beyond my daily food budget. And so I made do with those bananas, a pair of granola bars that had been in my pack since Portland, and some leftover biscuits. An act of solidarity.
Fortunately, the day’s walk had been shortened by the necessary detour, and the next day’s stage was similarly compact, with just 21 kilometers of open countryside leading onto Corleone. I had been eagerly awaiting this day since reaching Sicily. The mafia isn’t discussed openly in Sicily, even still; I can’t make any claim of a thorough study, but I’ve been looking around as I pass through different towns, and I’ve seen no written reference to the Cosa Nostra anywhere. Corleone, though, is inextricably connected to the Cosa Nostra, most importantly as the home of Salvatore Riina, the most violent and brutal of the mafia’s leaders, and the undisputed “capo dei capi” between 1982 and 1993. His successor, Bernardo Provenzano, who spent years on the run, was ultimately arrested at his country estate just outside of Corleone. Beyond the actual history, Corleone was employed by Mario Puzo in The Godfather as the surname of the titular character and his clan.
The Italian Wikipedia page on Corleone is fascinating. Once again, the presence of the mafia is obscured–you’ll have to scroll down a ways to find the first reference. In a section that reads more like a PR push from the town’s marketing folks than an encyclopedia entry, is the following: “The criminal activities of Cosa Nostra documented in the Mafia trials during the 20th century, together with the Hollywood film production that took up stereotypes of the Sicilian Mafia and the American Cosa Nostra, with the character of Don Vito Corleone in the famous film The Godfather and the novel of the same name, have caused damage to the image of both the municipality of Corleone and the Corleonesi themselves, erroneously associated with the Corleonesi mafia clan.
“In response, the community of Corleone, starting from the nineties, has started programs and projects that are an example of spontaneous territorial marketing. Groups of volunteers in various non-profit associations have contributed to changing the image of Corleone through social campaigns in favor of legality. One of these campaigns has received national attention and is based on the slogan ‘Corleone World Capital of Legality.’”
Still, even if my eyes roll a little at the top-like spinning in that write-up, there’s an important point that is all too easy to overlook. If all Sicilians have suffered in innumerable ways from mafia control, what was it like to live in Corleone through the peak of those bloody decades? I was astonished by the physical beauty of the space. Porous sandstone has eroded over the years to result in calcarenite cliffs towering above the town, and the Magna Via Francigena’s descent–when walked in reverse, as I did, which is definitely the superior way to arrive in Corleone–leads past an old castle tower, a shrine, and then down through those cliffs.
But context is everything, and I suspect for the Corleonesi those cliffs felt more oppressive, like the walls closing in, a barrier from which no escape was possible. It’s impossible to tally up the mafia’s many victims over the years. A basic metric like mafia-related murders–which topped out at 718 in 1991 and plunged to 28 in 2019–is illustrative, but ultimately unsatisfying and not particularly helpful in conveying the full magnitude of the Cosa Nostra’s deleterious impact. Other Sicilians, though, were working doggedly during those years to access that deeper truth. We’ll return to them in a moment.
After two easy days, I had saved a big final push for my last full day, with 52 kilometers separating me from Palermo. A dry 24 hours had cleared out the worst of the muck, making a pair of creek crossings viable, though some of the dirt tracks remained miserably clingy, often resulting in three or even four inches of clods accrued beneath my shoes, before they would suddenly fling off and launch me forward off kilter. Even that couldn’t slow me down, though, as the adrenaline-inducing proximity of the finish line propelled me through the boggiest of tracks. I couldn’t have mapped out a better breakdown of stops, as I faced a full 26 kilometers to my first town, Santa Cristina Gela, after which other options would pop up more consistently over the remainder of the day.
Typically, there would be a stop in the middle of this section, with the Santuario Madonna di Tagliavia offering a much-loved visit along with the possibility of nourishment of a non-spiritual variety. Centuries ago, tenant farmers–who else?–were laboring here when they exposed a large, square rock that, once turned over, turned out to be a painting of the Virgin of the Rosary. You know the drill, at this point. That discovery led first to an informal shelter and spontaneous prayer, followed by a small community of the faithful and claims of miraculous healing (through a nearby spring), and eventually to a more formal church and religious congregation. Alas, the sanctuary’s openings are limited to Sundays at the moment, but while I would have loved to make a quick visit, there was an advantage to being able to lower my head and power through the first half of the long march.
The world changed around Santa Cristina Gela, as the rolling agricultural fields were replaced with jutting peaks and small pockets of trees, with the influence of the northern coast and the Mediterranean subverting the interior’s dominance. One last ascent out of town brought me clear of the last interior hurdle before the descent to the coast–and Palermo–began in earnest. The MVF follows a lightly-used highway over an extended stretch, with the mountainside on the left, and a sharp drop on the right, during which the first glimpse of city and sea was revealed. Indeed, I could see the entirety of my remaining pilgrimage, with the nearby town of Altofonte, beloved Monreale sitting on the hill directly across from me, and then sprawling Palermo far below. The end was quite literally in sight.
And with that, the walk became a blur. A narrow footpath off the highway, followed by an endless staircase into Altofonte, leading into a steep and narrow road plummeting under a highway and onward into the valley, before an equivalent ascent along a relentlessly winding road. Somehow, this unassuming street proved to be among the most perilous of the whole walk, with no shoulder, constant blind corners, and intrepid Italian drivers passing each other around those turns. But again, I was pushing hard to the finish line, and utterly undeterred. Only one thing could stop me today.
That one thing was Monreale. Dating to the 12th century and the rule of William II, this is one of the great Norman cathedrals in the world. According to legend, this was inspired by the appearance of the Virgin Mary to William in a dream. According to historians, it was driven by the French-connected monarch’s desire to have a loyal archbishop, as opposed to the English-born Walter of the Mill who was already established as a force in Palermo. By making a massive investment in the spectacular new church and monastic complex, and currying favor with Pope Lucius III, William was able to earn a special dispensation for a new archdiocese–simultaneously earning a loyal ally and weakening Walter’s position.
William II’s wife was Joanna, daughter of King Henry II. Her influence shows up in the cathedral in a very particular way. Among the countless mosaics, of which it is said 2200 kilograms of gold were employed to produce, amidst all those Biblical stories, is one noteworthy figure–Thomas Becket, former Archbishop of Canterbury, whose murder was triggered by Joanna’s father. As John Julius Norwich asserts, this was the “earliest certain representation” of the fallen archbishop.
Becket is far from the first Christian martyr to make a lasting impact on Sicily. As with the peasant martyrs, these too have marked my progress along the Vie Francigene di Sicilia. In Catania, their patron saint is Saint Agatha, a young woman who was martyred under the 3rd-century persecutions of Emperor Decius. In the face of interrogation and dire threats, Agatha is said to have declared, “The suffering you will inflict on me will be short-lived, and I look forward to experiencing it. Just as grain cannot be stored in the granary unless its husk is first harshly crushed and shattered, so my soul cannot enter paradise unless you first have my body meticulously torn to pieces by your executioners.” And suffer she did, enduring unspeakable torture, which included–brace yourself–the slicing off of her breasts with pliers. (The undaunted Sicilians serve small cakes, known as cassatine or minne di Sant’Agata, that are shaped like breasts.) She was condemned to burning at the stake, but an earthquake disrupted those plans, and eventually she died in prison, likely in 251.
Further along the Via Fabaria, in the coastal town of Lentini, the town celebrates the Holy Martyrs Alfio, Filadelfo, and Cirino, and particularly Sant’Alfio. The three men were brothers, young men between 19 and 22, and like Agatha they were also Christians living in the 3rd century under Emperor Decius and his successor Emperor Gallus–and ultimately killed. In 251, the new Emperor Gallus ordered all suspected Christians to offer incense to a Roman deity–any Roman deity at all. The three brothers were swept up in this operation and sent to Rome, where they faced Prefect Diomedes, known for the harshness–and swiftness–of his punishments. Diomedes tried to persuade the brothers to abandon their faith, but they couldn’t be swayed. As they were nobles, they weren’t executed on the spot, but rather sent back to Sicily. There, the governor imposed punishment. Perhaps a swift execution in Rome would have been a mercy. The brothers’ hair was chopped off, their heads coated in boiling pitch, and their hands bound to heavy beams. They were then sent back to Lentini, making the long journey around Etna, through Catania, and then across flooded valleys back to their home town. Along the way, they were forcibly pushed onward by eight soldiers–who happened to drown in one of the swollen rivers, even as the bound and burdened brothers emerged unscathed. All manner of miracles were attributed to the brothers over the course of this journey; according to one story, Lentini was plague-stricken when they returned, and they promptly cured it of all disease. Nonetheless, the brothers’ fate was inescapable. They were paraded naked and barefoot through Lentini, whipped all along the way. Alfio’s tongue was ripped out, Cirino was tossed into a cauldron of boiling oil, and Filadelfo was burned to death.
The final Christian martyr I encountered came in Palermo. The last part of my pilgrimage from Monreale passed almost too quickly. A steep backroad brought me swiftly from the hill to the valley, all the more so as I literally ran through this section, and suddenly the Palermo street sign was staring me in the face, just across a busy intersection. All that remained was a long, straight march along a broad sidewalk. Unlike that departure from Messina, along a congested, chaotic road, this was easy, almost relaxing, walking. There was no city, and then I was surrounded by it, consumed whole, but the process couldn’t have been more gentle or inviting.
The next morning, I slipped into the cathedral soon after its opening. After Monreale, it’s a bit of a letdown; there’s no comparison between the interior of the two buildings, and I almost felt bad for Walter. One chapel, though, caught my attention, as it featured a contemporary photo of a man identified as Beato Giuseppe Puglisi. Also known as Pino, he served as the parish priest in the mafia-controlled district of Brancaccio in Palermo, where he labored to prevent young people from joining the mafia. This made him a target, and on September 15, 1993, he was assassinated in a mob hit. Nearly two decades later, Pope Benedict XVI, confirmed his beatification for martyrdom–the first mafia victim to gain this status within the Church.
That said, he is far from the only martyr to die at the hands of the mafia. Indeed, even after completing my pilgrimage and wrapping up my day of sightseeing around Palermo, my trip couldn’t conclude without a visit to two last martyrs. After all, I was flying out of Palermo Airport, more officially known as L’Aeroporto Internazionale di Palermo – Falcone e Borsellino.
To understand Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino and their importance to contemporary Italy–they are, in some ways, the secular equivalent of Padre Pio–some context is required. We don’t really know where the mafia began, but certainly its foundations are grounded in Sicily’s colonial years, during which armed guards maintained control for absentee landlords. They were the power behind the power, the locals who were practically in charge, regardless of official titles. After Italian unification, Sicily became an ungovernable mess, as bandits ravaged the countryside. And so, politicians in Rome made a bargain–the mafia’s 19th-century equivalents would be their “sons of bitches,” and in return for control and stability they could do as they wished. In the process, though, the mafia gained control over large blocks of votes, which they could–and did–leverage to gain political influence.
Mussolini was the first serious threat to mafia hegemony in Sicily, as he hammered the mafiosi with mass arrests and destruction of their property. In the process, though, he managed to make them into almost sympathetic figures, victims of Roman overreach and oppression. When the Allies made their move, pushing into Italy via Sicily, the mafiosi emerged from the shadows, coordinating with American mafia to facilitate the American military’s progress across the island. And after the war, Western fear of communism–especially in Italy, where it had found a very solid foothold–made the mafia desirable partners. The Christian Democrats emerged as the dominant political party in post-war Italy, propped up with American and mafia support alike, with the full understanding that corruption beat the hell out of communism. Money poured into Sicily to support its post-war reconstruction; a staggering percentage of those funds found their way into mafia hands. Over the course of the next two decades, there was a sort of “Pax Mafiosi” in Italy, with few mafia-related murders at all to speak of. There was plenty of money to be made–why fight?
But then there was too much money to be made. The international drug trade was surging, with a huge exchange established between Sicily and New York. Heroin flourished; from just 8 overdose deaths in Italy in 1974, this surged to 200,000 addicts in 1980. As business boomed and profits surged, mafia leaders–always content to coexist within a decentralized, federated framework–sought greater control. And this is where Salvatore Riina and his reign of terror in Corleone kicked in, as he ascended to the capo dei capi, the boss of all the bosses. His rise was achieved through absolute, unmitigated brutality. First, rivals were slaughtered. Loyal followers who were a little too talented, a little too charismatic, a little too dutiful came next. When a rival mafia family, the Di Cristinas, went to the police to rat out Riina, Riina responded by killing police officers, the anti-mafia commissioner, and Sicily’s president, along with every Di Cristina he could get his hands on.
During those years, there first appeared mention of “cadaveri eccellenti,” translated literally by Alexander Stille as “excellent cadavers,” and slightly more colorfully by Robb as “distinguished corpses.” These were the more important individuals targeted in mafia killings, like judges and politicians, as opposed to run-of-the-mill murders. Riina had no qualms, no compunction, no restraint.
That approach elevated him to power, but in the end it also ensured his demise. For decades, if not centuries, the Sicilian mafia, the Cosa Nostra, had been defined by omertà, a code of absolute silence, the Platonian ideal of snitches-get-stitches. Increasingly, though, mafiosi were looking around and seeing no exit ramp other than a coffin. Riina’s wanton brutality offered no sort of future. And where the Di Cristinas crawled, Tommasso Buscetta flew.
This is where Falcone and Borsellino make their entrance. The two men were Sicilian anti-mafia magistrates, and as some Sicilian authorities labored to address these cascading waves of violence, a large number of arrests were made of mafia figures from several key families. As Falcone dug into the available evidence, he started tracing currency exchange records, through which he discovered the transfer of three billion lire between Palermo and Naples over the course of just one year. Not long after, he uncovered the French connection, through which the mafia controlled the Marseilles heroin trade. Gradually, Falcone built an international network of magistrates and officials to track the international drug trade, leading to a series of significant early victories over the mafia. In response, the mafia had a number of judges gunned down. Borsellino, meanwhile, had been working in Monreale when the police chief was executed by three mafiosi. Over the course of the subsequent investigation, he also uncovered links to the drug trade, which brought him to Falcone.
All of this led to the crucial break–when Tommasso Buscetta was captured in 1983, after having run a link in the international drug trade for years. Fatigued and homeless, Buscetta broke the cone of silence, first offering this ominous warning to Falcone: “Never forget that you are opening an account with Cosa Nostra that will only be settled when you die. Are you sure you want to go ahead with this?” Falcone went ahead. What Buscetta offered was ground-breaking. For the first time, outsiders learned of the Cosa Nostra’s structure and organization, the way it functioned, and the ongoing breakdown of traditional norms because of the Corleonesi’s overreach and abuses. In Buscetta’s view, it was their violation of those norms that justified his own breach of etiquette with the shattering of omertà.
Armed with all of this new information, Falcone and Borsellino set in motion an earth-shattering event, the 1986 “Maxi Trial” against 475 mafiosi, that would ultimately span six years and result in 338 convictions. The two judges survived the trial, but they would not make it far beyond its aftermath. On May 23, Falcone and his wife flew home to Palermo from Rome. The freeway linking Palermo to the airport runs through Capaci. A skateboard had been used to guide 500 kilograms of plastic explosives into a drainage tunnel under that freeway. And when the Falcone car drove over the top, it blew sky high. Seeing his friend’s body hours later, Borsellino burst into tears. He had previously remarked that, “Giovanni’s my shield against Cosa Nostra. They’ll kill him first, then they’ll kill me.” He was right. Less than two months later, he too was dead. Both had made the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of Sicily.
Towards the end of Midnight in Sicily, Peter Robb speaks with Gian Carlo Caselli, a magistrate who took up the baton from Falcone and Borsellino, and thus lived with the same specter of death looming above him at all times. Robb reflects afterward that, “It was the paradox of Italy that this gravely compromised state, in the murky interregnum of jostling forces between the first republic and whatever might follow, still produced intellectuals who readily accepted to die for it.” The same island that gave birth to one of the most corrupt and corrupting scourges on the planet also produced the brave, uncompromising moral exemplars who gave their lives to fight it.
In the wake of their shared martyrdom, Italians couldn’t name enough things after Falcone and Borsellino. The airport, of course, but also parks, soccer arenas, schools, and streets in nearly every town. The image of the two men, sharing a laugh, is the subject of murals up and down the peninsula and across the island. If vocally condemning the mafia is a bridge too far, public praise for Falcone and Borsellino accomplishes the task, and maybe it goes one step further. It’s not enough, never enough, to simply oppose. We must also spotlight what we value most highly of all, to shout it from the rooftops, to cherish it with absolute resoluteness.
If I have struggled at times, on these Vie Francigene, to capture that feeling of pilgrimage, maybe it’s just because I’ve been looking in the wrong place. On an otherwise ordinary street in Palermo, a different sort of shrine has emerged. It’s not a church. There are no holy relics. There’s just a tree.
As Deborah Puccio-Den writes in “The Anti-Mafi a Movement as Religion? The Pilgrimage to Falcone’s Tree,” “Immediately after the ‘Capaci massacre’ on May 23, 1992 – which cost the lives of Judge Giovanni Falcone, his wife Judge Francesca Morvillo, and three of their bodyguards – the tree planted in front of the assassinated judges’ apartment became an object of strange devotion. The citizens of Palermo spontaneously gathered in front of it and decorated it with garlands of flowers, letters, and photos. In photos of the time, we see Palermians looking at this tree – which was immediately baptized l’Albero Falcone (‘the Falcone tree’) – in a state of rapture, gathered in a pious attitude, their hands joined, their eyes lifted heavenwards. Such gestures continued long after the moment of intense emotion elicited by the violent death of the most popular anti-Mafia investigating judge, giving rise to practices characterized as religious by the local population.”
Sicilians understand martyrdom–the simultaneous stomach punch of a profound loss and the glory and grandeur of heroic self-sacrifice. For me, it is the defining story of these weeks on this island, and one last chapter in this Jubilee walk through a pilgrimage of hope. Because Sicilians also have been given every cause for hopelessness, and yet that tree is still there, growing taller every day.
