Cosa Nostra by John Dickie

own research on Sicily in a substantial two-part report. In the first part, Sidney Sonnino, a profoundly melancholic character who would later become Prime Minister of Italy, analysed the lives of the island’s landless peasants. Leopoldo Franchetti’s half of the report bears the less than racy title, Political and Administrative Conditions in Sicily. But it has a unique stature; it is an analysis of the mafia in the nineteenth century that is still considered an authority in the twenty-first. Franchetti would ultimately influence thinking about the mafia more than anyone else until Giovanni Falcone over a hundred years later. Political and Administrative Conditions in Sicily is the first convincing explanation of how the mafia came to be.
    THE VIOLENCE INDUSTRY
    There was something rather English about the investigation mounted by Leopoldo Franchetti and Sidney Sonnino. Both men were great admirers of British liberalism and Sonnino owed his first name to his English mother. When they travelled to Sicily they were entering a land where the vast majority of the population spoke a dialect they could not understand. In the university and salon milieu that Sonnino and Franchetti left behind, the island was still a mysterious place known primarily from ancient Greek myths and sinister newspaper reports. So they planned for the considerable stresses and dangers of their journey with the resolve of explorers setting off for uncharted territory. Among the equipment they took on their journey in the spring of 1876 were repeating rifles, large-calibre pistols, and four copper basins each. The plan was to fill the basins with water and stand the legs of their camp-beds in them to keep insects away. Because roads were poor or non-existent in the interior of the island, the two researchers often travelled on horseback, choosing their routes and guides at the last possible moment to avoid brigand attacks.
    Franchetti in particular was far from entirely naive when he went to Sicily; two years earlier he had hacked across large areas of the mainland of southern Italy on a similar expedition. Yet what he found on the island caused him to feel overcome by ‘a profound tenderness’ towards the rifle he carried across his saddle. ‘The nightmare of a mysterious, evil force is weighing down on this naked, monotonous land,’ he later wrote. The notes that Franchetti actually took during the journey have only recently been published; two of the many stories that emerge from those notes can serve to explain the shock of his encounter with Sicily.
    Franchetti recorded that, on 24 March 1876, he and Sonnino rode into the central Sicilian city of Caltanissetta. Two days earlier, a priest had been shot dead in the nearby village of Barrafranca, a mafia stronghold, according to the authorities who informed them of what had happened. Sixty metres from where the priest lay dying stood a witness, a new arrival in Sicily, a government inspector from the northern city of Turin whose job was to supervise the collection of taxes on milled flour. This honest functionary ran to the priest’s side in time to hear his dying words of accusation: his own cousin was the murderer.
    Profoundly disturbed, the tax inspector jumped on his horse and rode off to tell the carabinieri. He then went to inform the victim’s family. Not wanting to upset them by blurting out what he knew, he told them to follow him to where the priest needed help. Along the way, he gently broke the news. Grateful for his sensitivity, they told him that the murder was the culmination of a twelve-year feud between the priest and his cousin. The priest himself was a wealthy man with a fearsome reputation for violence and corruption.
    Twenty-four hours later local police arrested the tax inspector, threw him in jail, and charged him with the murder. The witnesses against him included the priest’s cousin. But the people of Barrafranca, including the murdered man’s family, kept quiet.