Trial on Sicily

Giuseppe Fava was one of the many journalists killed by the mafia, but he was also a lot more than a journalist. First and foremost, he was one of the most versatile and sharpest intellectuals in Sicily in the 1900s: narrator, reporter, essayist, playwright and painter. The following extracts are taken from an investigative book called Trial on Sicily, which gathers together thirty-five investigations published during 1966 by the Catanian paper La Sicilia. In the first passage on Palma di Montechiaro, tough and almost desperate, looks into Sicily’s social health. A Sicily that dramatically lives on in its exterior appearances, in the disruption of its demographic composition—the effects of the great postwar migratory waves. An impoverished Sicily, defeated and emptied of young people, a Sicily that has yet to know what in many towns will later be called a distorted well-being, a consumerism with no development, a Sicily that is still transitioning from rural mafia to urban mafia, while the latter has already seized power in Palermo. He also makes two dazzling illustrations of the mafia in Corleone. Social misery and easy money are the prospects, the essences and the causes and effects of the mafia, a mafia that has by no means been overcome.