on the road to the other Corleone...

Beatrice picked me up around 2 pm in Palermo. We drove north along a narrow, undulating stretch of highway lit up in technicolor to Corleone's recently named Piazza Falcone and Borsellino in the center of town. 

Our plan was to meet with Giuseppe Crapisi, the President of Corleone Dialogos, Cosimo Lo Sciuto and listen to a talk given by  German journalist Petra Reski about her book, "The Honored Society" at the Associazione Laboratorio Della Legalita.

Photo Credit, Antonella Lombardi, Ansa, 2013

 The 'pizzo free' Pasticceria in the newly named Piazza Falcone and Borsellino

Petra Reski and Giuseppe Crapisi speaking with students at the Laboratorio della Legalita

Reski was in town to speak with a group of students from northern Italy interning at the vineyards of Centopassi (One Hundred Steps). The vineyard,named after a film dedicated to Giuseppe "Peppino" Impastato, a Sicilian radio broadcaster and anti-Mafia labor organizer who was murdered in 1978 by the Mafia, is part of the Libera Terra project. Founded in 1995 by Father Luigi Ciotti, a Catholic priest from Turin, Libera Terra (Free Land) is an organization that coordinates the efforts of a range of projects throughout Italy dedicated to fighting organized crime. Under Libera's sponsorship, students throughout the world regularly visit Corleone to work and to learn about a history rarely spoken about in the formal school curriculum. 
  

Giuseppe Impastato, 1948-1978

Corleone once had the highest murder rate in the world - 153 violent deaths between 1944 and 1948,inspiring novelist Mario Puzo to adapt its name for his famous fictional crime family in The Godfather. Francis Ford Coppola perpetuated Corleone's notoriety with his Godfather Triology. But today, Cosa Nostra is certainly not a way of life and any kind of Godfather tours are felt to be in bad taste by the Corleonesi. Since 2002, activists have re-branded Corleone, a project that emerged from their initial protest of the Afghanistan war and Corleone's crumbling infrastructure in 2002.  

In my interview with Cosimo, he described one of the exercises he does with first-time visitors to Corleone. "What are the first words that come to mind," he asks, "when I say the word Corleone?" "Inevitably," Cosimo explains, "people say things like, the Godfather, Vito Corleone, Toto Riina, mobsters and corruption. It is as if there is nothing dignified about where we live. It is as if our history is nothing but shameful." These responses led Cosimo and his colleagues at Corleone Dialogos to begin telling stories of another Corleone, tracing its very real history to, for example, socialist syndicalist, consumer cooperative leader and politician, Berdardino Verro. 

Sitting in the lobby of the Laboratorio, Cosimo told us the story of  Verro. Beatrice, who is Italian and went to public schools in Palermo, knew nothing about him. An innovative labor organizer, Verro served as Corleone's first socialist mayor in 1914. In 1893, Verro hosted a conference in Corleone to draft model agrarian contracts for laborers, sharecroppers and tenants and deliver them to landowners. Under Verro's leadership, Corleone became the strategic center of the peasant movement and the strike wave. While Verro initially  formed an  alliance  with some prominent Mafiosi in outlying towns, he did so in an effort to secure the strike effort among laborers. Eventually, he too became a member of the Fratuzzi (Little Brothers)a Mafia group in Corleone.But, during the strike of the peasants in September of 1893, when the Fratuzzi boycotted it by providing the necessary labor to work the land that peasants refused to cultivate, Verro broke with the Mafia and became their most hated enemy. 

Verro was killed by the Mafia on November 3, 1915.   
There is more to Verro's story, but I won't go on here. Most striking is the way in which Corleone Dialogos reaches for existing stories, builds in fact, on preexisting political legacies to re-categorize central events from their past in much the same way nations working through the process of transitional democracy do (see Rothberg, 2013). Verro offers one story to Corleone,  but there are others. There is the  story of union leader, Placido Rizzoto and  Rosario Livatino and a long history of innovative agricultural cooperatives and labor organizing.