Palermo Emerges from a Dark Period to Gain Both Self and World Confidence.
Moody's recently gave Palermo its highest bond ratings, the same as Helsinki 
and Paris, and higher than New York.

Mr Linza prefaced his post with the statement that: 
"This is a fabulous book written by a son of friends of my family, who is the 
Mayor of Palermo which concerns itself not only with issues of Sicily, but 
Calabria [and the core of what has really gone on in Italy.] " 
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"Fighting the Mafia and Renewing Sicilian Culture"

by Leoluca Orlando 

Prologue 

             It was June of 1999 when Palermo finally ceased to be a Third 
World city -a city of which a French traveler in the previous century justly 
said that "even the lemon and orange blossoms smell of corpses"-and became a 
great European city at last. 
             I had been predicting this transformation all those years that 
Palermo was known throughout the world only as the Lebanon of Italy, a 
shooting gallery for the Mafia where bloody, bullet-riddled bodies littered 
the streets and women dressed in Sicilian black stared down at the 
"illustrious corpses" with looks of inexpressible grief. I knew my city well 
enough to know that someday we would leave this deathscape behind us and 
reclaim those distinctive Sicilian values-family, friendship, honor-that the 
Mafia had hijacked during its tenure as our national parasite and degraded
into things sinister and malign. But my predictions were discounted because, 
after all, I was the mayor of Palermo and I had to put a good face on our 
hideous reality. 
             In the 1980s and early 1990s, the body count mounted into the 
thousands, including such eminent figures as the general in charge of our 
security forces, the chief of detectives, the chief of police, and two of the 
most famous magistrates in Europe. According to some estimates, there were 
more victims than in Palestine or Belfast or the other troubled places that 
monopolized the world's attention. So my critics would sometimes snidely ask, 
"And where is this First World city now, this great European city we have 
heard so much about?" 
             Even in those times of criminal holocaust, I believed that 
Palermo would eventually choose life, because I believe that human nature is 
good and God is just. But while I was certain that this transformation would 
someday come about, I will admit that often during the last two decades 
-Sicily's years of living dangerously -I did not believe it would occur in my 
lifetime. As I walked through Palermo in the summer of 1999, however, I saw a 
place that was incredibly alive and, even more amazing, quite unafraid. 
Strolling along the side streets and boulevards, I could see the real Sicily, 
a land which, far from being a grim embodiment of human evil, has always been 
a map of human possibility. 
             A thousand years ago, the Moors defined Sicily as "the meeting 
point." Theirs was essentially a religious definition: they believed that the 
light of Allah, the light of Prophecy, shone with particular warmth upon them 
here. But in fact, many cultures met and merged on this island. If I were to 
say that the Sicilian is Greek, Arab, Spanish and French, in addition to 
being Italian, I would be speaking truth-but only a piece of it. We never 
really drove out the many invaders who conquered us through the millennia; we 
just absorbed them and turned them into Sicilians. Yet ironically, to meet 
our true identity, we needed finally to take up arms against the one part of 
us which seemed most intrinsic, but was actually most foreign of all: the 
Mafia and its culture of death. 
             I could cite statistics showing the change that resulted when we 
did. After all that time during which hundreds were killed every year, for 
instance, there were just eleven murders in Palermo in 1999, none of them 
Mafia-related. Yet the real proof that the long siege had finally been lifted 
was in the quality of life on our streets and in our public places. People 
congregated in the Vucciria, our traditional street market, and no longer 
thought twice before entering the Kalsa, the old Arab quarter-both places 
considered dangerous not long before. Free at last to inhabit their own city, 
they congregated at rediscovered monuments like Santa Maria dello Spasimo, 
the sixteenth-century church whose nave, never finished and open to the 
skies, provided moonlight theater as dramatic as the Baths of Caracalla in 
Rome. 
             Perhaps the one place that encapsulated Palermo's reemergence as 
a city of life was the Teatro Massimo. At the time of its opening in 1897, it 
was one of Europe's finest opera stages; and from the moment a young tenor 
named Enrico Caruso sang Ponchielli's La Gioconda that first season, it 
became an obligatory stop for the world's foremost opera singers. In 1974, 
this great monument was closed for "urgent, immediate repairs" which were 
supposed to be finished in six months, but stretched out over the next 
twenty-three years, as most of the many billion lire earmarked by the Italian 
government for the renovation disappeared -with the complicity of local 
officials and politicians -into the pockets of contractors linked to Mafia 
bosses. 
             The great opera voices faded into a dim echo of distant grandeur 
as the Teatro Massimo continued to decay. Its only function was to remind us 
of the fine civic life that had been stolen from us, and to provide a private 
parlor for a group that met daily in the basement to socialize and play 
cards. Nobody appeared to care that Mafiosi regularly mingled there with 
journalists and professionals. 
             Then in 1996, as if to confirm that the plague of illegality and 
violence was subsiding, renovation work on the Teatro Massimo was at last 
resumed. Within a year it was refurbished in all its glory, including the 
gilded frieze that reads, "Art Renews the Peoples and Reveals Their Life." On 
the night of the grand reopening, the people of Palermo turned out in the 
thousands. They were not first-nighters, and they didn't care whether they 
got inside or not. It was enough simply to be present as this magnificent 
building was born again. 
             Yet in June 1999, the year Palermo served notice that it had 
returned to the land of the living, the Teatro Massimo was more than a 
symbol. It was also the site for opening ceremonies of the international 
conference of CIVITAS, an international organization dedicated to promoting 
civic education and the values of freedom. In hosting this conference, 
Palermo was offering itself as an example to the delegates who came from 
eighty countries around the world, including places like Russia and Georgia 
and Rwanda and Uganda, where civil society is more imperiled than it ever was 
in Sicily during the darkest days of Mafia domination. The keynote for 
CIVITAS was given by American First Lady Hillary Clinton, who, echoing John 
Kennedy's famous Berlin speech, told delegates that those who doubted the 
ability of a citizens' movement to build democracy need only come to Palermo. 
She talked at length of the lessons my city offered those parts of the world 
that still suffered from epidemics of crime and lawlessness, emphasizing that 
it was the people, not the politicians, who had to decide that "enough was 
enough" and begin slowly taking back their city, their country and their very 
lives from the evil forces that had long controlled them. 
             As she spoke, I could see that people like Pino Arlacchi, who 
had fought the good fight against the Mafia as an Italian citizen and later 
as deputy secretary general of the United Nations, recognized what a charmed 
moment this was. Much-abused Palermo was once again the crossroads of the 
Mediterranean, as it had been in earlier centuries when Phoenicians, 
Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Moors, Normans, and finally Italians came here 
and left their mark. And the commerce now would not be in heroin and murder, 
as it had been over the last quarter-century, but in ideas about how cities 
and cultures are renewed. 
             The delegates from CIVITAS and the tens of thousands of other 
tourists crowding Palermo during these summer days were of course aware of 
our grim history. It was not hard to find vestiges of that other Palermo, the 
one called, as early as the 1765 edition of Diderot's Encyclopedie, a ville 
destruite-a city destroyed by repeated invasion during the nineteenth 
century; by the Allied bombardment in World War II; and most of all by the 
Mafia building program aptly named the "Sack of Palermo," which turned a 
grand city that had survived so much and still managed to remain beautiful 
into something ugly and haggard. 
             Palermo had been destroyed most of all by murder, particularly 
the murder of those who had tried to save the city from itself. There had 
been many fallen heroes over the years, the death of each one depleting 
Palermo a little more of its hope and will. When General Alberto Dalla 
Chiesa, who had become famous for subduing the Red Brigades, was gunned down 
in Palermo in 1982, the city's newspapers showed his bloody body, with that 
of his lovely young wife beside him, under the headline: "Here lies the hope 
of honest Palermitans." And then in 1992, hope died again when Giovanni 
Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, courageous magistrates who had brought the 
Mafia to judgment in an internationally celebrated trial, were blown up by 
car bombs, actions which for a few weeks seemed to mark the beginning of a 
coup against the government of Rome as well as Sicily, and against the very 
concept of human decency. 
             But even in our darkest hour, although we didn't know it then, a 
new life was stirring. One sign was in the hand-lettered placard that went up 
after the double martyrdom of Falcone and Borsellino: "Today begins a dawn 
that will see no sunset." And by the summer of 1999, the sun was shining 
brightly indeed. 
             There was the wonder of being normal -for instance, being 
normally curious about the doings of the First Lady and her entourage of over 
a hundred, who had taken over the stately Villa Igiea hotel, once the 
personal residence of a Sicilian family that made a vast fortune in tuna 
fishing at the turn of the century. And about what Chelsea Clinton was doing 
when she went out nightclubbing, together with my daughter Leila, in parts of 
the city that a few years earlier would have been off limits for any decent 
young woman, let alone the daughter of a president. How far we had progressed 
was clear when I took some CIVITAS delegates to Corleone, birthplace of the 
bloodthirsty sect that had destroyed the "old" Mafia in a struggle for power 
that claimed over a thousand victims. The streets we walked were now 
beginning to look like a museum of crimes past. At the town hall we had a 
public discussion of the Corleonesi's mafia gangsteristica, which had 
terrorized Palermo and indeed all of Sicily. A short time earlier, this would 
have been an act of bravado swiftly punished; but now it was simply a tour of 
a dead past whose criminals eventually choked on the blood they shed. 
             What was the lesson I drew from our recent history? the CIVITAS 
delegates asked. I replied that our struggle showed that the law court is 
only one front in the campaign against violence and lawlessness. The other is 
culture. An image that occurred to me early in my own fight against the Mafia 
was of a cart with two wheels, one law enforcement and the other culture. If 
one wheel turned without the other, the cart would go in circles. If both 
turned together, the cart would go forward. 
             So, at the same time as brave lawmen and prosecutors were dying 
in order to establish a rule of law, we were trying to rebuild our civic 
life: repossessing symbols like the Teatro Massimo; taking back our politics 
after a generation of collusion; and perhaps most important, reclaiming our 
children and their future. Along with our public places, the Mafia had taken 
over our educational system-not only because it knew that maintaining 
ignorance among the people was the key to its power, but also because there 
was money to be made. We stopped renting school space from Mafia front men 
and women. We began to implement an antimafia curriculum. One of the 
childrens' art pieces shown to Hillary Clinton when she toured our city 
depicted children holding hands around a criminal with a gun, isolated within 
their circle. 
             We also began to work with the children in the "Adopt a 
Monument" program. In the average American or European city, even a run-down 
one, such an effort would have been simply a modest attempt at social uplift. 
In Palermo it was a revolutionary break with the past, because the Mafia, 
like any totalitarian force, gets its power largely by stifling cultural 
memory and civic identity. In the last few years, some two thousand students 
have adopted over fifteen hundred monuments in Palermo: churches with murals 
to be uncovered; public offices of earlier centuries to be painted and 
brought back into service; parks to be made green and blooming again. As they 
demanded that the dirt be removed from these monuments, our children knew 
their work was a metaphor for cleansing the spirtual grime deposited by years 
of criminal rule. 
             I told the delegates of CIVITAS that the chief lesson of the 
Palermo renaissance was that while it is possible to lose momentum or even 
slip backward in the political/legal realm -as evident in the moral 
stammering that has defined the Italian government's response to the Mafia 
-there is no backtracking in the civic realm. People who have known freedom 
will not willingly go back to degraded collective lives. They will not unsay 
words like "Mafia" once they have been said. They will not become stupid 
about democracy once they have experienced it. They will not again surrender 
the monuments and public places that show where they came from and define who 
they are. 
             As Paolo Borsellino, the courageous magistrate and my old friend 
who died for this new Palermo, once said, "The solution to the problem of the 
Mafia is to make the state work." This is partly a matter of justice and the 
rule of law. It is also a question of meeting human needs in the civic realm, 
from the need for jobs that don't involve collusion with a criminal 
conspiracy, to the need for democracy and a culture of freedom. 
      During the summer of 1999, when I looked at my city as if with new 
eyes, I also looked at myself and, as I often have over the past few years, 
felt amazed to be alive. For many years -a longer time than I care to 
remember-I was a marked man. The question was not whether I would be killed, 
but when and how. In a special it did on me, England's Channel Four called me 
"the Walking Corpse." And that is how I felt. I experienced death vicariously 
every day. But then, as the people of Palermo began to enter their new dawn, 
I had a sudden thought: "Good Lord, I might actually live!" How would I spend 
this extra life I had been granted? The answer was easy: making this city 
great again. 
             I still have a dozen bodyguards, and we all move in armored 
cars. I still instinctively duck when I hear a backfire and look nervously 
over my shoulder. I know that the Mafia is still out there, haunting the 
Sicilian sleep. Yet although the stake has not yet been driven through its 
heart, the organization is dead. It died the minute it was expelled from the 
political system where it had come to dwell during its long sojourn in our 
national life. The Mafia no longer rules us. It is outside our local 
government now. Palermo is no longer a pariah among cities. When the 
financial journal Moody's recently gave us its highest bond ratings, the same 
as Helsinki and Paris and higher than New York, it thereby announced that the 
changes in Palermo over the previous few years were structural and profound, 
fully warranting that sign of confidence.
             For a city that has lived in the shadows to come out into the 
sunlight again is a miracle. Yet this miracle has not been without cost, and 
I often pause at some moment during my day to think of all those who died 
-the brave and the ordinary; the major characters, the supporting actors, and 
the bystanders. I want to believe that their deaths have not been in vain, 
and sometimes do. For I believe that what has occurred in Sicily is in fact 
an epic story, a story of death and transfiguration. Walking through Palermo 
in the summer of 1999 and afterward, I have often felt a survivor's special 
guilt, and also a survivor's unique responsibility: to tell the story as it 
happened.