Corleone, the Sicilian Mafia

Corleone and the Mafia: an unbreakable link

Corleone is a village in the country region of Palermo. Its fame started when its name was linked to the name of the mafia Family in the American movie saga “The Godfather.” In fact, the Corleone family does not exist. It is a cinematographic fiction. The truth is much more painful, because post-war Sicilian mafia grew on from its association with ascending Mafia bosses from Corleone, who after several mafia wars managed to get the upper hand over other groups, controlling effectively, through friendships and allegiances, the whole of Sicily. A slice of life experienced from the 1950s until today has been described in great detail in the recent book Don Vito, written by the son of Don Vito Ciancimino, a true Corleonese, who was a well-respected citizen and later became Mayor of Palermo. For more than two decades, he also represented an example of the connivance between governmental institutions and the Mafia causing the so-called “sack” of Palermo, which destroyed vast territories of agricultural land within Palermo’s “Golden Basin” (Conca d’Oro). Churches, villas, houses and refined palazzi of great architectural worth were burnt to the ground to provide space for the construction of gigantic reinforced concrete buildings commissioned by and belonging to mafia enterprises. This allowed the Mafia to extend its power over all licit and illicit matters connected with the local economy. During this period, a war with all Sicilian legal institutions was initiated, that in the 1980s and 1990s caused the unprecedented slaughter of all police officers, judges, paramilitary police members (carabinieri), journalists and members of other institutions who attempted to oppose its power. Today, after the arrest of all the first-rate mafia bosses, their close and distant relatives still live in Corleone, the place that functioned as the bloody brawn and the brain of the Mafia. Even if overwhelmed by reinforced concrete building, Corleone maintains some of the characteristic features of the old silent code of omertà in this island, seemingly silent and lethargic, but still fiery in its heart through a collective will to re-establish its ancient power. Corleone deserves a visit to better understand the origins of the mafia phenomenon. It is possible to explore the places where the mafia bosses and their lieutenants lived, and quite often hid, such as the building where the mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano hid several times. The place now functions as an anti-Mafia laboratory where products coming from the territories confiscated to mafia bosses are on sale. Indeed today, a few dozen businesses exist in territories previously belonging to Mafia mobsters, which function as cooperatives of young people dedicated to production business. From a naturalistic point of view, a suggestive scenario is created by the "twin fortresses'', one to the east of the town where the Soprano Castle is located with the remains of the ancient Saracen watchtower and the other in the centre of the town in a limestone block geologically collapsed from the front mountain and on which the mediaeval castle was built, now the hermitage of the Franciscans. Right at the foot of the Soprano Castle you can admire a spectacle of nature, the "Cascata delle Due Rocche'' formed by the leap of the San Leonardo torrent, a tributary of the Belice River, which creates a suggestive natural lake surrounded by the remains of an aqueduct probably of Arab origin . The stream with the waterfall flows inside a real natural gorge forming a canyon that can be travelled inside in the summer. Other attractions in the area are the nearby woods of Rocca Busambra and Ficuzza where there is the Real Casina di Caccia, a sumptuous palace built in 1799 by King Ferdinand IV of Bourbon. Another obligatory stop at the "Gole del Drago'' along the Frattina river.

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