Heroes and Villains
Nobles & Aristocrats, Fascists & Mafiosi

They make strange bedfellows, but the Nobility and the Mafia have at least a few things in common. One of those things is their exclusivity. If we accounted for every titled nobleman and every "made" Mafioso in Sicily, our tiny census would embrace far fewer than one percent of the Sicilian population. Seeking to extend Sicily's complex social chessboard, we could add Catholic bishops, aristocratic knights and Mafia pawns to the list, but our sampling still would not represent even one percent of the island's five million souls. Even so, the aristocracy and the Mafia have profoundly influenced life in Sicily.

The word nobility (and the Italian nobiltà) comes to us from the Latin nobilitas ("known") because the nobles were known to the populace. Historically, most of the nobility's rights were based on feudal law. In stark contrast, the Mafia developed as a clandestine society whose members, for the most part, were not known to anybody outside its fraternal ranks. Mafia activity was based on breaking, or at least circumventing, the established law. The identity of the local count or baron was published in official records and (until 1812) he could legally tax the residents of the town whose feudal rights were vested in him. The identity of the local Mafia leader might also be known, but his monies were collected illegally and his "rights" were based on fear. In the countryside, the ordinary person sometimes found it difficult to distinguish between the two social forces, and this made it easy for the Mafia to craft an image of itself as a quasi-aristocratic organization based on the code of chivalry, virtually supplanting the aristocracy outside Sicily's largest cities.

Your travels in Sicily may take you to a church where a traditional wedding is being celebrated, or to a good restaurant, but you probably won't meet any noblemen or mafiosi. Both the nobility and the Mafia are virtually invisible. To visitors, one of the differences between the two groups is that while the legacy of the aristocracy is ubiquitous, the Mafia's footprints are not. Even if, during your visit, you are not likely to meet anybody from either group, a passing knowledge of each is essential to a better understanding of Sicily's history and people. For better or worse, it is the famous and infamous who come to mind when people think of Sicilian society, and no consideration of Sicilian history would be complete without at least mentioning its more prominent social phenomena, though over the centuries the nobility was obviously much more important than the Mafia, which is a rather recent development.

The "new" Mafia has evolved in recent years, adapting itself to new circumstances and developing as an essentially white collar element of Sicily's widespread political corruption. Thus one speaks of "Mafia Culture" rather than the Mafia per se.

In truth, both the Mafia and the nobility are rather elite groups, arcane micro-societies unto themselves, their day-to-day activities virtually unknown to those outside their own tiny social orbits. They represent social extremes, but during the nineteenth century, their mutual disdain was not enough to discourage a tacit cooperation tantamount to nothing short of control of the general populace. As recently as 1948, landed aristocrats used the Mafia to dissuade rural residents from claiming the uncultivated estates that the government permitted them to occupy in the rugged Sicilian interior. The Fascist regime despised the traditional Mafia. They had their own.

We sometimes refer to it as "Mussolini's Mafia," an evil corps composed of the Devil's footsoldiers. The facts are little known to "younger" generations of Italians, but Italy's Fascists (assisted by anonymous Italian soldiers) committed so many atrocities in Ethiopia and the Balkans that Italy became the first nation condemned by the United Nations for crimes against humanity. In Sicily, torture and censorship were the tools of their trade. Worse than any Mafia (old or new), Sicily's homegrown Fascists were many, and a general amnesty following the war gave them immunity from prosecution in Italy. There aren't many actual Fascists left in Sicily; most are elderly by now, and Italy's Neo-Fascists (represented by the Alleanza Nazionale and several more "extremist" political parties) are dangerous only to themselves. During the Second World War, the Mafia's opposition to Fascism certainly played a role in the party's defeat in Sicily. It was a question of one group of scoundrels opposing another. Today, Fascism in Italy reflects a mentality more than a lifestyle.