Corleone is a strange little Sicilian town, its squares and streets adorned with plaques honouring famous anti-mafia campaigners. Methought they did protest too much: as I joined the Corleonesi on their evening stroll one Easter a few years ago, I couldn’t help noticing that the young locals had styled themselves as extras from The Godfather.
Apart from lending its name to one of Hollywood’s best-known fictional families, Corleone spawned an organised-crime clan of exceptional brutality, even by the standards of the Sicilian mafia. After the second world war, a local doctor, Don Michele Navarra, and his psychotic henchman Luciano Leggio, transformed the clan from a band of cattle rustlers into the masters of the town. Their ascendency was followed, in the 1970s and 1980s, by that of Toto Riina, who strangled, shot, bombed and poisoned his way to the position of capo di tutti capi.
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Assisi is one of the must-see medieval hill towns in the central Italy region of Umbria (see Umbria map on Europe Travel). Assisi is famous as the home town of...
The Italian government was ordered to pay $160,000 to a gay man who received a driver’s license for the disabled after he volunteered information on his sexual orientation to military authorities, the man and a gay-rights group said Monday.
Danilo Giuffrida, 27, said he told officials about his homosexuality when he took a physical after being called up in 2000 for Italy’s mandatory year of military service, which has since been abolished.
Giuffrida told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from his hometown, Catania, that he had hoped to avoid service and keep working to help support his family. Giuffrida was disqualified for psychological reasons.
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On a sun-drenched morning last week in Palermo, the Sicilian capital, a bunker-like courtroom in the Ucciardone prison was the scene of a rare challenge to the mafia. Bosses and low-ranking “soldiers” stared fixedly from their steel cages as seven shopkeepers – hidden by shaded glass – identified those who had allegedly collected extortion money from them for years.
To date, 18 Palermitans – owners of bars and pizzerias, shops and car showrooms, even a street vendor who sells olives – have picked out their tormentors, for whom extortion rackets are the key instrument to control a neighbourhood.
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Ask a roomful of readers about Lampedusa’s “Leopard” and more often than not you’ll find a few who will put hand to heart and say it’s their favorite book, and a few others who will simply shrug — never heard of it — or ask if it has anything to do with the Visconti movie starring Burt Lancaster (yes, it does). I suppose it’s a coincidence that a roomful of travelers will poll in a similar fashion if you ask them about Sicily, the marvelous, maddening island disparaged and adored in “The Leopard”: it’s either a favorite place, or they haven’t even thought of going there.
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