The Best American Travel Writing 2012 (13 page)

We were too numerous to all fit in the van, so I joined the women from Veneto in their rental car. We drove down residential streets and parked in front of a ten-story apartment house. A small olive tree stood in front, its branches dripping with caps, ribbons, an Italian flag. Here, Edoardo explained, Paolo Borsellino had been killed by a car bomb, along with his bodyguards. He had just come from paying a visit to his mother, who lived in the building.

Eighteen years later, stuffed animals and scrawled messages still sanctified the site.
Not all Sicilians are Mafia and not all Mafia are Sicilian,
read one note. Another said,
The fight against the Mafia should be a cultural and moral movement that involves everyone, especially the young generation.—Paolo Borsellino.

Back in our vehicles, we headed out of the city and up Mount Pellegrino, site of the Santa Rosalia Sanctuary. (“The Mafia are very Catholic,” Beatrice had explained to me, in a voice heavy with exasperation at the irony.) The patron saint of Palermo, Rosalia is revered for having saved the city from the plague in 1624.

A yellow convent backed into a cliff at the top of a series of unfolding steps. “In 2005,” Edoardo said as we climbed upward, “Addiopizzo put a sign on the sanctuary that said, ‘Santa Rosalia—free us from the
pizzo.
' She once freed us from the plague,” he explained. “Now the plague is the Mafia.”

Inside the chapel, everyday crowds jostled their way past sacred objects. The spectacle of commotion mixed with reverence, common to any pilgrimage site, was here amplified by the fact that it was contained in a cave 1,400 feet high. The devout and the curious made their way through the dank cavity to a statue of Rosalia, backlit in blue. As I was leaving, I noticed, high on a wall in the vestibule, a plaque commemorating the visit of Goethe, who had “contemplated the primitive simplicity of the sanctuary” and the devotion of the people. Not much had changed in the ensuing two centuries.

It was important for Addiopizzo to relate to the Church, Edoardo said when we got outside, because it still had a great deal of influence on people. In the past the Church had been indifferent to or even accepting of the Mafia, but that was changing. After the murder of Giovanni Falcone, Pope John Paul II spoke out against the Mafia. (A rare papal condemnation of the organization that came, perhaps not coincidentally, from the first non-Italian pope since the sixteenth century.) In 1993 the Mafia killed a priest, Father Giuseppe “Pino” Puglisi, who worked in a poor neighborhood of Palermo. Edoardo told us Puglisi “tried to organize free- time activities for kids” who would otherwise have gone to the Mafia.

Back in the car, Agnese apologized for her English, which was infinitely better than my Italian. “Problem in Italy,” she said. “People only speak Italian.”

“Yes,” I said. “Outside of Italy, Italian's not really spoken much.”

“Only Formula One,” she said. “And opera.”

We came down from the mountain and were soon driving along a street sprinkled with beachgoers and lined with villas. This was Mondello, Palermo's resort town. We found the rest of the group on the seaside promenade, in front of an impressive Art Nouveau bathhouse.

As we strolled, I asked Maria where she lived in Rome. “Near St. Peter's,” she said, adding that she had been baptized in the basilica. “My father worked at the Vatican. He wasn't a priest,” she said, smiling. “He was an architect.”

Among the many decals on the door of the Renato Bar was one identifying the place as
pizzo
-free. “At first they didn't want to put it,” Edoardo said. “But after they did, they saw that more people came.”

We pulled a few of the outdoor tables together, and they soon filled with bowls of gelato, plates of brioche, and tulip glasses of granita, the delicious flavored ice that is a specialty of Sicily. The young man from Verona insisted I take some of his brioche and dip it into my almond granita; I did, blissfully putting sweet on sweet. I learned that the group was spending the entire week on an Addiopizzo tour, staying at a
pizzo
-free hotel on the beach. Very few hotels are members of Addiopizzo. When I asked Edoardo why, he said it could be because they've been paying the
pizzo
longer than most businesses—in the past, smaller business had been left alone.

The next day I picked up my new trousers, which had needed to be shortened, put on my new shirt, its blue stripes partially disguising the logo, and walked out of the SoleLuna feeling like a Palermitano, a sensation that only increased when I bought a bouquet. But I still wanted my suitcase back.

Beatrice (another Beatrice, not the vintner) lived in a modern building on a quiet street a few blocks west of the designer shops on Via della Libertá. She was a writer, a friend of a friend. Her apartment was on the top floor, and when she opened the door, her daughter's new puppy headed enthusiastically for my white pants.

Her daughter was studying anthropology in Turin, her son philosophy in Berlin: the far-flung children of Sicilian intelligentsia. The university in Palermo, the son said, had some good professors, but “the worst administration in Italy.”

A friend by the name of Maruzza arrived, and we moved to the table. “I hope you like pasta,” Beatrice said, passing me a bowl of fusilli cooked with eggplant and tomatoes. This was followed by cold plates: meatballs, pecorino cheese, slices of potato, more eggplant and tomatoes. The daughter opened a bottle of wine, then placed it on the table, where it sat untouched. Was it the guest's duty to pour in Sicily? Nothing I'd read had indicated that.

Maruzza did most of the talking, telling us all about her handbags, made by women in the worst slum in Palermo, a place with the unlikely name of Zen 2. There was also a Zen 1, I was told, the name an acronym for “northern extension zone.”

“It is the Bronx of Palermo,” someone said.

“The police won't go there,” someone else added. “Everyone there is Mafia.”

I said I'd like to see it.

Beatrice got up and unwrapped a box that Maruzza had brought. It contained not pastries but exquisite miniature ice cream cones, each tiny individual scoop encased in a dark chocolate shell.

When we'd eaten them all, Beatrice showed me the apartment: the wraparound balcony, with a distant view of the sea; her office off the living room, the walls lined with books. Despite these comforts, she spent quite a bit of time on the mainland. “It is hard to live here,” she said, forgoing an explanation, as she had the wine.

Maruzza picked me up near the SoleLuna the following afternoon. We drove out of the center, passing through Parco della Favorita, which Norman Lewis had described affectionately as a prowling ground for prostitutes, who—back then, at least—were called
lucciole
(fireflies). Now all we saw was litter.

Eventually we entered a bright, spacious compound of housing that looked like a failed cubist experiment. Long, straight streets were lined with small-windowed apartments. At lunch the day before, Maruzza had downplayed the danger, and now she drove through the compound with seeming nonchalance. Residents passed us on the street—there were more people loitering than driving cars—but few paid us any attention, though I looked at them. After all the talk about the Mafia, I wanted to see a mafioso. I felt a bit like V. S. Naipaul, traveling through the South on a mission to find a redneck.

The compound was harsh but not ghastly, and drenched in sunshine. In his novel
The Leopard,
Giuseppe di Lampedusa wrote that not even the “vibrant Sicilian light” could disperse Palermo's pervasive sense of death. But here it helped diminish an atmosphere of menace.

We parked by the church and entered the annex. The priest had offered a work space to Maruzza and her group, who were currently on summer hiatus. Father Miguel was not in, so we took a walk along the “piazza.” That word carries such connotations of stateliness for a foreigner that it sounded odd when applied to a vacant, garbage-strewn lot whose only inhabitants were two mangy dogs.

Maruzza pointed to the building running along its edge. “Many of the women I work with live there,” she said. She had started the project two years earlier, teaching the women to make luxury handbags. Though of different designs, they each carried the large label LABZEN2, like a declaration of faith or a sign of radical chic.

Maruzza said most of the bag makers were married to mafiosi, who didn't appreciate their wives working, going out of the house, acquiring a feeling of empowerment. “They don't like me,” she said with blithe resignation.

Zen 2 was also a center of the drug trade. Kids were recruited as couriers, and residents of Palermo made the trip out to do their “shopping.” It was the old, sad story of hopelessness and crime, here combated by a pragmatist with a penchant for bags.

On the drive back to Palermo, Maruzza said she'd get me a meeting with the owner of Antica Focacceria San Francesco. Then we made a stop for gelato.

Thursday morning, Edoardo came by the SoleLuna to continue our talk which had been interrupted by the tour group. The group was spending the day with a coworker; in fact, I was meeting them for lunch. We sat in the living room, the French doors of the balcony open to the heat. I told Edoardo that I'd been to Zen 2. He said the Mafia doesn't like that the schools are there and added that the teachers have to fight against the culture of the parents. About the piazza, he remarked, “It doesn't look like Italy. It looks like a Middle East place.” He mentioned a plan—a dream?—to build a garden park there. If you wanted to be effective in the fight against the Mafia, you had to create something that could be used in the poorest neighborhoods. If they understood that they had a garden there because of the anti-Mafia, that could be helpful, he said.

He told me more about the growth of Addiopizzo. While it began by recruiting members, now it waited for business owners to come to it. One man, a publican in the nearby town of Caccamo, wrote to Addiopizzo, quite distraught. He had gone to the police with the name of his extortionist, and in the process lost most of his customers. Edoardo, along with some colleagues, drove out to his pub to have a beer—a gesture he called “an act of ethical consumerism.” And they continued going, every Saturday night, taking friends with them to fill the place. They started organizing parties there. This made an impression on the youth of Caccamo—normally for nightlife, people from Caccamo go to Palermo.

Still, Edoardo confessed disappointment at the pace of Addiopizzo's growth. “In 2008 a lot of shopkeepers testified against the Mafia in trials,” he said. “We expected more would say no to protection money, but it didn't happen. When you think 460—it is really a minority. I was thinking from one year to another maybe a thousand. That is not happening.”

But there was cause for hope. Fifteen years ago, he said, if you thought about not paying protection money, you thought about Libero Grassi. Now you might think about the 460 who don't pay.

I asked Edoardo about the Mafia souvenirs—black T-shirts with pictures of Marlon Brando, caps with
Kiss My Hand
in Italian—that one sees in Palermo's tourist shops. “They are twisting the image of the Mafia,” he said. “They are focusing on picturesque aspects. If Americans come with this notion, they have no idea what the Mafia is. Making money with these
Godfather
shirts is to me a crime.”

In Corleone, a town some 40 miles south of Palermo, they sell Don Corleone liqueur and organize Mafia tours. “It's very fake,” Edoardo said. “The most serious thing is they don't say a word about what the Mafia was—and still is. And they don't talk about the anti-Mafia movement.” Addiopizzo takes tourists to Corleone, but instead of the bar, they show them the anti-Mafia museum, which was opened by the mayor in 2000.

I asked Edoardo if his parents worried about him. “Yes,” he said. “They are proud, but at the same time worried. They say, ‘You should be prudent.'

“I would be worried if Addiopizzo lost the support of the people. That's a situation when the Mafia could attack because we'd be isolated. Libero Grassi was completely isolated. The Sicilian Industrialists' Association criticized him, saying he should not make so much noise. Now the Industrialists' Association supports Addiopizzo and expels members who pay the
pizzo.

“Right now it's unlikely that the Mafia will attack us. Addiopizzo is under the spotlight. The backfire would hurt them. But the strategy can change very quickly,” he added.

Edoardo headed off to another appointment, and I made my way to Via Vittorio Emanuele, where I was meeting the group for one last time at the store that sold only
pizzo
-free products. It was easy to find; a large yellow-and-green sign over the door read:
PUNTO PIZZO FREE
with the word
L'EMPORIO
underneath it. Unlike the small decal on the door of the Renato Bar, this signage stuck out like a boast or even a taunt.

Inside, a petite young woman with a bright, round face sat behind the cash register. She had an openness I'd seldom seen in Palermo shop assistants, and I pictured the most hardened mafioso wandering in and immediately melting. It would be like trying to extort money from your kid sister.

Valeria, the woman at the register, said it was her husband, Fabio, who had gotten the idea for a store that specialized in products from
pizzo
-free enterprises. Business was good, she said; when the store opened, over two years earlier, it had received widespread coverage that had brought in locals as well as tourists from abroad. “When people ask if we are afraid, we say we are so exposed all over the world, so we feel protected.”

In addition to the shop, Valeria and her husband had started an agency that organizes
pizzo
-free events. “We had a
pizzo
-free wedding—flowers, photographer, singer, hotel.” While sharing in her obvious joy at their accomplishment, I was struck by how much of a Sicilian's life is connected to the Mafia, unless one works at making it otherwise.