Camporeale is a mediocre town in a landscape filled with the emptiness of broken dreams. It lies twenty-two miles to the south and west of the city of Palermo.

On the island of Sicily, a place of endless despair on the edge of Italy, that makes you angry, in silence but never in peace, it’s a way-station en route to destination nowhere.

Tomasi di Lampedusa, perhaps Sicily’s most famous author, described a setting that typifies the scene:

“Boundless countryside of feudal Sicily: desolate, without a breath of air, oppressed by the leaden sun.”

In the 1950s, about 8000 people lived in Camporeale, their daily existence controlled and governed by poverty and a devil’s triangle of church, state and the Mafia.

Read the entire story: https://gangstersinc.org/blog/vanni-sacco-the-mafia-and-the-politics-of-power