Read Best Books About Italy - Travels in Time

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Many authors have included the Mafia and Italian towns such as Corleone in their novels. And not just novels.  In the last five decades since Norman Lewis’s Honoured Society - The Sicilian Mafiaobserved’, at least twenty serious studies have been published about the ‘Society’. Less serious works amount to well over a hundred. Many of these – like Mario Puzo’s ‘Godfather’ and subsequent narratives and films – range over a wider territory than the island of Sicily. And it seems the Mafia have even published books about themselves. Taking a break from the business of extortion, smuggling and drug dealing, shelves of airport bookshops sport paperbacks with titles such as: ‘I’ll Make You an Offer You Can’t Refuse: Insider Business Tips from a Former Mob Boss’,or ‘Mob Rules: What the Mafia Can Teach the Legitimate Businessman’. Or ‘The Mafia Manager’. Unsurprisingly, few of them fall into the category of best books about Italy. 

I reached Corleone after what seemed a long drive from Trapani. The distance wasn’t great but the number of bends in the road certainly was.  Surprisingly, reaching Corleone required descending to the town rather than climbing up to it. Corleone’s most important road (the Agrigento-Palermo highway) arrived above the town’s rooftops via a tunnel. Northbound traffic suddenly came across the place after spending several minutes in dusty fume-filled darkness. Thus, Corleone had a somewhat furtive air as if it were hiding itself and its business from the normal affairs of Man.

In reality, the dun-coloured sandstone which overlooks the town gives a shadowed aspect to its narrow streets through which the visiting motorist has to ease with care whilst spending more time than desirable looking at tattered wall posters – the photo memorials pasted up in every Italian town. In the ‘capital of the Sicilian Mafia’, I scrutinised them for signs that the deceased might have met an early and untimely end.

Noone in the Corleone of the twenty-first century, it seemed!  Septinarians Luigi Bufacchi, Ricardo Guercio and Mario Arlacchi appeared to have died in their beds looking as hail and hearty as possible under the circumstances. Where were the images of shifty-looking young men with shiny suits, black shirts and badly-knotted white ties? Did Corleone deserve its reputation as the ‘Dodge City’ of Sicily?

The impression was misleading. It was only a few decades ago that two ‘Mafia wars’ interrupted everyone’s afternoon sleep. Peace in the little town was as freshly minted as the twenty-first century. Fifty years ago, a chain of tit-for-tat executions burst out which was later given the more grandiose title of ‘The First Mafia War’. And then, twenty years after that (in the early 1980s), its narrow streets saw another outbreak of mayhem dubbed ‘The Second Mafia War’.  Both were power struggles. Corleone really was ‘Dodge City’.


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