Giorgio Locatelli - Made in Sicily

In so many places you see the old ladies preparing food in the way they have done for centuries, with the same ingredients, but there are also some young chefs who are taking the same ingredients and combinations, but interpreting and proposing them slightly differently; not only in Palermo, but in the cities on the other side of the island: Noto, Modica, Messina … In one Michelin-starred restaurant, La Gazza Ladra in Modica, the chef, Accursio Craparo, makes artistic creations such as watermelon salad with sea urchin sorbet; ‘linguine’ with a cream of anchovies, candied orange and wild fennel flowers; and a clever little mini ‘burger’ of beautiful tuna: some of the ventresca (the fat belly) is mixed with some of the back and formed into little ‘buns’ that are part steamed, then fried, and filled with a slice of raw tuna, and a ‘mayonnaise’ of anchovies, lemon, sea urchin and fish liver, with herbs scattered on top.

Palermo is a loud city; from the swallows that wake you up in the morning to the sellers in the market, everyone seems to be shouting. No wonder tourists get scared – and these guys are only trying to sell snails! People say Palermo is dangerous, but I don’t see it as threatening; I find it warm and welcoming. And I like the hustle and bustle and noise. But of course there have been times when, unseen by the outsider’s eye, it has been a dangerous place, because the city is in the heart of Mafia territory.

‘Nobody sees; everybody knows’

If you look hard enough in Palermo, you can still see some of the white stickers that appeared one night all over the city, with a message that translates as: ‘there is no dignity in a people that pays the pizzo’ – the protection money demanded by the Mafia. The stickers were an invitation to join the newly formed addio-pizzo movement, an alliance of restaurants, bars, shops and businesses that display the addio-pizzo sign in their windows, which tells you they are refusing to pay.

You cannot talk about food without talking about the Mafia, because the roots of the Mafia are in the land, and when you control the territory, you can control the production of the food, its transportation, and its price. But food also brings people together, and slowly, slowly, a change is happening in Sicilian society and it is being determined by a young generation of restaurateurs and bar owners and food producers who are finding strength in numbers and the courage to stand up to the might of the Mafia.

In the late 1980s, when I was already cooking in England, the Mafia seemed to be always in the newspapers and on the TV news: the wars between the rival families, the drug trafficking, the money laundering, the murders of anti-Mafia politicians, judges and the investigating magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the kidnappings, the trials. I was fascinated by it all, but I never seemed to see any explanation as to ‘why?’ For a northern Italian it was difficult to understand the power of the Mafia, the way it had infiltrated every organisation, so much so that during the trials, it was said that the only safe place to talk in the Palace of Justice was in the lift. So for an Anglo-Saxon person, I imagined, it would be almost impossible to understand.

Then I read Cosa Nostra, A History of the Sicilian Mafia, by John Dickie, Professor of Italian Studies at University College London, a brilliant, compelling, but also very scholarly work, which had a very big impact on me. Dickie told the story in a way that had nothing to do with folkloristic Godfather images of ‘Men of Honour’, the kind of glorification that brings busloads of tourists every year to Bar Vitelli in Savoca, near Taormina, where they filmed the wedding festivities of Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s movie of the Mario Puzo novel.

Since then I must have devoured a whole library of books on the Mafia, and every time a new one is written, I have to read it. So I have done a lot of searching over the years, to try and understand. You have to think about the history of Sicily: the Greeks and Romans came and left, the Normans came and left, the Spanish came and left, then suddenly Garibaldi arrived and everyone was Italian. But the promises that were made, that the land would be redistributed, didn’t happen. Instead the balance of economic power shifted to the north of Italy, where industry and production increased, and in the south and in Sicily many people just became more poor. So in the vacuum between rich and poor, the state and the people, rose the Mafia.

The roots were already there in agriculture under Spanish rule, because the barons who owned the big estates were away in Palermo and in their absence they appointed managers, middle men known as gabelotti, who took a foothold of power, and whose ruthless henchmen were known as campieri. Out of this grew the Mafia, tapping into the Sicilian idea of Cosa Nostra, the sense of family, of looking after one another, all bound up with a sense of fate, maybe inherited from the Greeks, that somehow made the people trust in the Mafiosi, because they were their own, even though they ruled by fear and brutality.

What is interesting is that in the east side of the island the Mafia didn’t take hold in the same way, because there, under the Spanish, the land was allowed to be inherited by a son, and so there were small tenements, rather than baronial estates, and not the same need for the powerful ‘middle men’.

It is only when you spend time in the western side of the island, and get to know the people and the way the place is run, that you can begin to understand that the Mafia is everywhere, but there is no way you can tell who is the Mafia. It is an undercurrent. It is there, and it is not there. Nobody sees; everybody knows. The prices are controlled, and the territory is controlled, centimetre by centimetre.

For a long time, the existence of the Mafia as a structured organisation was denied, right up to the trials of the eighties. Even now there are people who will say it doesn’t exist or, ‘They are good people. They make things work.’ Yes. But it has been proven that the mafia is bad for business, because its presence has slowed down the development of Sicily in comparison to other regions of Italy.

What I feel is that Cosa Nostra is inside the people; you cannot defeat it on the streets, or in the courts of justice alone; you have to do it in heads and minds. In Midnight in Sicily, Peter Robb quotes the writer Leonardo Sciascia, who summed up perfectly the complicated relationship that exists between the community and the Mafia: ‘Take this Sicilian reality I live in: a lot of things that make it up I disapprove of and condemn, but I see them with pain and from inside … It hurts when I denounce the mafia because a residue of mafia feeling stays alive in me, as it does in any Sicilian. So struggling against the mafia I struggle against myself. It’s like a split, a laceration.’

I see some pessimism, but a lot of optimism. Pessimism because not everyone believes in change, and because some say that when the Mafia appears quiet it is at its most dangerous; and optimism in a new-found strength and pride among restaurateurs and food producers, boosted by organisations like Slow Food, which is helping the people to understand that there is a different way to market their food. And then you see the Libera Terra farming projects, in which land confiscated from convicted Mafia bosses is being given to co-operatives of young people to grow crops or make wine. The most famous is the Terre di Corleone, where a vineyard has been planted on the land of the imprisoned Salvatore ‘Toto’ Riina, near the town whose name Mario Puzo borrowed for his family in The Godfather. Ironically, he chose it just because he liked the sound of the name (which means Lionheart), with no idea of how notorious Corleone was to become as a Mafia town a decade later. When you see these agricultural projects, you have real hope that at last the people will begin to accept that they can work this beautiful land for themselves, and come out from under the cloud of Cosa Nostra.