In 1986 the Sicilians built a fortified bunker in the grounds of Ucciardone prison in Palermo. Inside were 471 men and four women accused of running a criminal empire. Held in cages, they rattled the bars and hurled insults. Outside tanks and soldiers were stationed. The Maxiprocesso (“Maxi Trial”) was the largest mafia trial in history.
In the press gallery was Leonardo Sciascia, a Sicilian public intellectual and writer who was a lifelong crusader against Italy’s rampant corruption. “I learnt to understand the mafia from his books,” Giovanni Falcone, one of the leading prosecutors at the trial, said. The sentiment was true for most Italians. When many wanted to dismiss the Mob as a myth, a product of northern Italian prejudice, Sciascia’s detective novels (gialli) and historical investigations (inchieste) showed the mafia as alive and kicking. And his books sold ridiculously well.
At the Maxiprocesso too was Caroline Moorehead, there to cover the trial for The Times. She never met Sciascia but she knew his books and was intrigued by this small, obstinate man. What forces had created this justice-obsessed moral lodestar?
Forty years later and now a veteran biographer with a remarkable knowledge of Italy, Moorehead answers the question with A Sicilian Man, which is as much a history of the deeply crooked culture of Italian politics as it is a a vivid biography of one man.
Sciascia was born in 1921 and grew up in Racalmuto, a bleak village north of Agrigento in Sicily. The local school had no heating, nor buildings of its own. Sciascia knew his family were fortunate: he wore shoes, even in the summer. His father was a bookkeeper for the nearby sulphur mines, a position that kept him apart from the men who worked inside the mines — nightmarish places of suffocating heat that would recur in Sciascia’s books.
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Little had changed in Sicily after Italian unification in 1870. To be Sicilian was different — connected to the mainland but also alienated. The island was backward and beset by illiteracy, conditions that allowed the mafia to take over the running of feudal estates, growing rich and powerful in the process.
The Maxiprocesso (“Maxi Trial”) in Sicily in the 1980s and 1990s was the largest mafia trial in history ALAMY
Sciascia came to know the mafia in his bones. As a boy at election time, Moorehead writes, he watched strangers arrive in the village and make their preferences clear. He knew the local capo (boss), Don Calo, and saw how these men whom no one ever mentioned conversed “mainly by gesture, moving their eyes, hands and heads”.
He never got over seeing a mafioso visit a shopkeeper known to be behind on his payments. The man tenderly stroked the hair of the shopkeeper’s small daughter and said: “She seems almost alive.” He recognised, Moorehead writes, that “the mafia’s form of justice, with its codes and omerta, was more real to most Sicilians than a toothless government”.
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