Italian Exam 2

Discuss the role of journalists (of any kind - print, radio, photo) in the fight against the Mafia, the dangers they have faced, the contributions of Giuseppe Fava, Roberto Saviano and others, and what you know of antimafia journalism in the digital age.

1. What is the state of press freedom in Italy based on the 2018 press freedom report? Which of the issues mentioned in the article do you think are the greatest threats to an effective free press in Italy? Freedom of the press is not really an option in Italy It seems as if any talk of the mafia is unacceptable and should be avoided by the press The biggest issue is the violence that is being committed against the journalists In the article it says that violence against journalists has more than tripled in 2018 2. Find at least two issues with press freedom that the US increasingly shares with Italy and state why you chose them Where does the US currently rank in the same press freedom rankings mentioned in the article? Does this surprise you? I think that one issue in the US is that journalists have to be very careful what they write about the government While the mafia is not the government they still have much power over people Another thing is that journalists in the US face similar threats as those in Italy It is important to note that these two issues are both problematic because they create control over what is being written which is not the definition of freedom The US has turned from being a satisfactory place for journalists to now being a dangerous one Many journalists have been physically attacked which definitely surprised me I think with social media, it makes it easy for people to attack each other verbally However, it does surprise me that it has started happening physically 3. What is the "Journalism Tools to Fight Organized Crime" program and how is it connected to Giuseppe Fava? What do you think of this initiative? This is a program for journalists on how to be productive as a citizen and a journalist They learn how to properly report on organized crime Giuseppe Fava was an investigative journalist who was killed by the mafia for exposing them I think that he kind of opened up a door for journalists to realize how important it was to expose mafia activities and what an impact journalism could make It is important that journalists recognize the risks and learn how to do it in the safest way possible 4. What are some of the daily challenges faced by antimafia journalists that are lucky enough to even get police protection in Italy? Who is Matteo Salvini and how does he and some of his colleagues threaten the safety of antimafia journalists? What do you think his motivation is? Many journalists need 24/7 surveillance and cannot often leave their homes Matteo Salvini is a politician who threatened to take away the protection of antimafia journalists I think there is always a chance someone in the government could be connected to the mafia, because we have seen it many times However, it may simply be that he doesn't feel it is necessary to spread the word about the mafia or perhaps he is getting threats himself 5. Who is Roberto Saviano? What does he say about the current state of conditions for journalists worldwide? What does he also reveal about his own life as an anti-mafia journalist in his interview? Roberto Saviano is an Italian antimafia journalist He talks about how much of a threat journalism can pose for some people on both ends He states that his words mean nothing, the mafia is not threatened by the words he writes However, its people reading the words that threaten the mafia and turn everything into something dangerous He lives with 24/7 protection and basically accepts the fact that he could be killed at any time Yet he knows how important the work he is doing is so he does not plan on stopping anytime soon 1. What are Fava's three ethical principles of journalism and how are they interconnected and dependent on each other? Do you agree with this analysis? His three ethical principles are truth, freedom, and justice Truth and freedom interconnect because as a journalist you have to feel as if you have freedom to print the truth However, not everyone has that freedom or if they do, they may not use it in a truthful matter Justice comes when both truth and freedom are present and even then it can be difficult A journalist could freely print truthful words about the mafia and still justice may not be served I think that this is a good way to look at it because as a journalist this setting, it may be easy to give up or back off because of fear You may not see direct and immediate justice from the words you print But the point is to get the truth out there and get people talking about it because that is the first step to making a change 2. In "Excellent Cadavers" Alexander Stille (the journalist and film's narrator) seemed to highlight one topic as the most dangerous for prosecutors to pursue and for journalists to report on What is that topic and how do we see that same idea reflected in the case of Giuseppe Fava? It is dangerous to talk about corruption of the government That is mafia members being connected with the government Fava works to expose lies the government may be telling in order to cover up the existence of the mafia and their activities 3) Which of Fava's ethical codes do you think the author would say is being facilitated the most today through web-based media? Why? What does the web potentially bring to the anti-mafia movement? I would say freedom The reason for this is because I think it is very easy to print whatever you want online because you are not directly saying it to somebody's face and sometimes you may not even have to expose that it is you Media is not always the truth and it is not always just But although the act of hiding behind a computer screen can bring some negatives a positive could be that people have the ability to spread the word without revealing their identity It also helps to expand the audience and help people all over the world be aware of the mafia and give them suggestions on how they could help the problem in Italy

Mafia and the Media: Italian Journalists Face Threats

Italian journalist Paolo Borrometi was forced to move to Rome from Sicily because of threats connected with his reporting on organized crime In May 2014, Borrometi was beaten by two hooded men near his home after he asked citizens to report any relevant information to investigators about a two-year-old murder Despite being forced to relocate to Rome, Borrometi's work uncovering mafia activities continued, as did the almost constant intimidation he faced For freelance reporters a mafia threat does not just affect personal safety, it creates a serious obstacle to performing their jobs The Italian Interior Ministry released official figures of the number of journalists under police protection for the first time in June 2017 to highlight the growing phenomenon Borrometi works as editor-in-chief of a local webzine, LaSpia.it, and is a freelance contributor to several other media outlets Beppe Giulietti, president of the Italian journalists' trade union FNSI, recounted a conversation he had with Borrometi after the Interior Ministry decided to put him under escort: "He was worried this situation could interfere with his job." "Compared to the past, the current situation for journalists shows fewer mafia killings," Giulietti told Index on Censorship The precarious economic situation for Italian journalists means, said Giulietti, "a defamation lawsuit could be as lethal as a bullet" Many lawsuits have no legal basis Italy has a long history of journalists killed by mafia-affiliated killers, especially during the late 1980s and 1990s In these civil cases, the plaintiff demands enormous amounts of money even though the alleged damage is minimal The financial fragility of journalists has led to a phenomenon that Alberto Spampinato, president of Ossigeno, calls "the Italian paradox." Freedom of information, especially related to the nexus between organized crime, politics and corruption, is constantly under siege After an initially strong reaction from the public, things usually turn silent Giulietti said no one is taking on the issue of lawsuits which are "only made to intimidate journalists" and stressed that politicians are more focused on amending the system so it doesn't publish news that could adversely affect them rather than fixing the legal vulnerabilities that affect media freedom According to the latest Ossigeno report, reporting on organized crime is harder for people who live in remote places For example, in Rho, a small town in the outskirts of Milan, the newsroom of the local newspaper Settegiorni was vandalized by a group of unknown people three times in three months, the latest incident occurring on September 3 Though politicians are slow to act, some parts of the Italian parliament are monitoring the situation A defamation lawsuit could be as lethal as a bullet Until now, there have been no legal solutions to this problem, which leaves many reporters at risk and makes in-depth reporting about organized crime even more difficult

Can Ida tell us anything about the relationship of women and the Mafia?

The latest summer fashions Pouf skirts for women over 100 pounds Two fashion experts give their answers But without being too heavy-handed women readers want to be informed, but not to the point of boredom The entire time she was there she closely studied the gestures and words of the women around her, trying to guess the secret of that success Badly shaven guys or women with caked-on make-up

'The bodyguards'

"Here at least we can be sure that they will not poison us," Michele Albanese, a Calabrian investigative reporter, said as he greeted me at a restaurant in Rome "I mean, they won't poison our pasta with ketchup," he added quickly, laughing at my startled reaction Eating in the shadow of chestnut trees, we looked like strange company, as two men in civilian clothing—the police escorts—sat quietly next to us occasionally scanning the surroundings but not participating in our conversation For Albanese, this is normal The reporter for the daily Quotidiano del Sud has been under police protection since 2014, after receiving threats over his investigations into the powerful group, the 'Ndrangheta "Even with police guards, back home in Calabria, I would not be able to sit outside in a restaurant like here, that would be too dangerous," he said "Only nights are difficult The loss of everyday freedoms and a wish for a return to normal life were common to all of the reporters with whom I met, but a heavier burden affects their professional life "La Scorta made me completely change the way I can do my reporting," Angeli told me when we met in her office "I very much miss field reporting, but I can continue my work, I just had to adapt my reporting to the circumstances," she said Angeli said she does most of her interviews either by phone or arranges meetings at the Rome headquarters of her newspaper, a building that can be entered only through steel grid gates and interlocking doors And, although she lives near to the family whose members were imprisoned due to her investigations, Angeli has refused to move "When you are waging a war, you cannot leave the battlefield," she said Her book, A mano disarmata (Unarmed hand), which recounts her struggles with local mafia groups, has been turned into a movie Angeli was not the only journalist determined to not let the threats and police protection impact their working life. Lirio Abbate, deputy editor of the prominent weekly, L'espresso in Rome, said, "I do not want this drama to hijack my life, to be identified as the journalist under police protection, or the anti-mafia reporter, I do not want this to define me as a journalist Abbate, who describes himself as "a humble servant of the news" worked as an investigative reporter in his native Sicily through the 1990s and 2000s, amid threats and even a murder attempt in 2007: the same year he was assigned police protection The threats don't just come from mafia Paolo Berizzi, of la Repubblica, was assigned 24-hour police protection in 2018 because of death threats from neo-fascist groups that he reported on When we met in a cafe in his home town of Bergamo, in northern Italy, with his police guard watching from across the square, Berizzi acknowledged that he had to change the ways he reports "The police protection is important for prevention," Berizzi added, "Even if it demonstrates how weak the Italian state is, how much it is on the defense and unable to deal with the mafia and the neo-fascists group with other, more pro-active means Giovanni Tizian, an investigative reporter who covers the mafia for L'espresso and la Repubblica in his native Emilia-Romagna region, agreed that protection was necessary "Italy has become a more dangerous place for journalists, especially since politicians often wage verbal attacks against journalists and the debate about the police protection did not help the situation either," he said Tizian was referring to comments that Salvini made in a video posted to his Facebook page in May, while still deputy prime minister and Interior Minister In the video, the politician addressed anti-mafia writer and author of Gomorrah, Roberto Saviano, and said that he would like to revise the criteria for police escorts Saviano has been assigned full police protection since 2006, following threats over his writing on the mafia Salvini had proposed cutting police protection previously, including a speech in April, when he discussed more generally the system of police protection for journalists, politicians, magistrates and even businessmen A spokesperson from Salvini's La Lega party did not immediately respond to CPJ's email requesting comment "These attacks are just words, but for words, very dangerous," Alberto Spampinato, director of Ossigeno, told CPJ He explained that an independent body of the Ministry of the Interior decides on police protection for those at risk, including journalists, politicians, businessmen, magistrates, or government officials.Journalists who are assigned armed escorts represent only a fraction of the almost 600 people protected by the police "It is a highly efficient system, which other countries study as an example and it prevented the mafia from killing any Italian journalist since 1993, as opposed to eight killed in the period since 1960 to 1993," he said When I asked the journalists assigned protection whether they felt safer, the answer was unanimously yes As Albanese said, "I have a duty to stay ... to continue living in Calabria, in my land, to show that we can continue to be journalists despite all these limitations and I believe that a true journalist will always find a way, no matter what the circumstances are

Analyze the parts or themes of Brave Men (Galantuomini) highlighted in the film - the portrayal of Lucia as a female in power in the world of the Mafia, the extra obstacles she faced because she was a woman, your interpretation of the title of the film, the significance of the ending, among others.

1) Film Title - can be translated as "Brave Men", "Gentlemen", "Men of Honor" Why have a film about a woman be titled "Galantuomini"? To whom does the title refer? Discuss how each character does or does not fit the description of these terms: "Brave Men", "Gentlemen", "Men of Honor" Fabio - Fabio was loyal to the mafia, however he was not able to perform his duties so given that he doesn't exactly fit the title Barabba - He does fit the title because he shows that he is not afraid to do what needs to be done to eliminate threat and achieve what he wants Infantino - I think that Infantino fluctuates between what he believes They mentioned in the film that he used to be better and more productive until he started with the drugs which then caused him to slack off Ultimately I think he does not fit the title because of his lack of motivation to complete his mafia duties Ignazio - I think he fits the title in the sense of being quiet about the mafia activities that he knows are going on He also keeps quiet about Lucia's involvement 2) Lucia as an example of a "(wo)man of honor" What obstacles does Lucia face in this film that men in the Mafia do not? How does she or does not fit the criteria to be called a "woman of honor" as compared to the men in the film? Lucia is not fully respected as a leader or a boss She has to fight for respect and justify a lot of her orders and ideas She also is portrayed by other men more sexually which also adds to the lack of respect She does fit the stereotype I would say, she is obedient and thinks of her decisions carefully However, towards the end of the film it seems as if she begins to question the activities and decisions of the mafia 3) Analyze the scene where Lucia gets revenge on her assailant What do you think Is it important about this scene? How does the advice that is given to her by Is a critical key to properly understanding this scene? She acts in a seductive manner This gives off the impression of the role that is expected of her to play and then she shows by pushing and shooting him that she means business and is not going to deal with him disrespect 4) What did you think of the last ten minutes of the film? Describe what unfolds and what do you think the very end tells us about Lucia overall I thought that she was questioning her life decisions and involvement in the mafia a lot She seemed to live a different life with Ignazio, perhaps the life she thought she wanted I think towards the end when she left she was realizing that even if she wanted it this was not her identity and she could not change her life that easily

example occurred in the 1940's, between two Greco families near Palermo

A widowed mother and her daughter, who lost their husband-father the year before in a ferocious mafia attack, retaliated and avenged his death During a gunfight, these two women saw that one of the men whose family killed their husband and father, was injured but not dying, and they "finished him off with kitchen knives" This is not unusual for the women who are left behind and who are not anti-mafia, to seek revenge on the behalf of their dead male relatives

what is the 'mafia'

According to John Dickie, the mafia, specifically the Sicilian mafia, is "a sworn secret society that pursues power and money by cultivating the art of killing people and getting away with it" Though there is no written rule book for the mafia, this secret society is a collective group of "men of honour" and since "honour is exclusively a male quality", the mafia is therefore made up of solely males Also of importance is that "mafia families and blood families are distinct entities" where mafia families are constructed of territorially joined 'families', and not blood relations It is possible though, for blood families to exist within the territorial families

Introduction: All Victims Are Worthy of Commemoration

Alternatively, the Corriere della Sera simply states that "the man seems to have punished her just because she associated with some kids her age who were linked to a rival clan Another status update from the same day commemorates "vice brigadiere Rosario Iozia" murdered on 10 April 1987 in Cittanova Here, then, on the Casamemoria Vittimemafia Facebook page, the daughter of a minor mafia family and a Carabiniere squad commander killed in the line of duty are commemorated using the same unembellished, straightforward journalistic language Anthropologist Deborah Puccio-Den's (2008) work on the religious and hagiographic characteristics of antimafia commemorative narratives is helpful here in understanding why the more inclusive gestures of Casamemoria Vittimemafia are so unusual: To understand these texts, one must go back not only to the practices that drive them, but also the context in which they were produced: The transformation of the antimafia struggle into a religious battle Thus, we see that, as typically happens in any given community, in its attempt to shape cultural and collective memory, the historically dominant voices in the antimafia movement have selected certain figures to celebrate and certain ones to ignore Scholars from various disciplines reveal the ways in which certain victims of the mafia who are not perceived as conforming to the qualities listed above by Puccio-Den risk being erased or repackaged by agents of collective memory Commenting on the depiction of the character Maria's death in the film Gomorrah (Garrone, 2008), Renga (2013) writes: I am suggesting that Gomorrah represents another case in which the hierarchy of grievability is laid bare: some lives, such as anti-Mafia martyrs Peppino Impastato and Placido Rizzotto, are acceptable to mourn Here, Renga draws on Judith Butler's (2009) concept of "grievability" to make a provocative statement calling for a reassessment of the way blame for an entire system of inequality and corruption is displaced onto certain figures who are inescapably caught up in it Finally, in her article "'Eccentric Subjects': Female Martyrs and the Antimafia Public Imaginary" (2012), Paula Salvio argues that while Francesca Morvillo (the wife of Giovanni Falcone and a judge herself, also killed in the Capaci bombing) is included in the social network landscape of antimafia commemoration (on Facebook, for example), she becomes "overshadowed" by the movement and her Facebook commemorative page ultimately becomes "a site of struggle that displaces her memory with iconic images of antimafia history that commemorate masculine histories and relegate her to a figure who lacks political significance worthy of remembering" Pickering-Iazzi, Renga, and Salvio provide specific examples of how memory makers both include and exclude in order to shape the past and therefore the future But before I address the questions raised here, I first offer a detailed description of the Facebook pages and blog that are the subjects of this essay

What does Ida ultimately want and what are the five different ways she considers achieving it?

Don Pino elaborated a brief recapitulation that took into account the most important points 1) Don Vito started from nothing and without any help, even though a lot of help arrived later 2) He had staked his life on a place where no one was willing to give up on their own accord even a crumb of what they had 3) He had stayed in the shadows. Beyond his own circle and the circle of his friends, no one had ever heard of him 4) He had taken a big risk from the start, because it is always a risk to put aside one's habits and tested means of protection and to say 'I,' most of all where everyone looks for the slightest opening to appear, in order to scramble on and climb up 5) It went well for him Don Pino smiled, pleased with himself

Testimony by LETIZIA BATTAGLIA

I remember a little old woman who used to come to bring us eggs She'd climb the stairs up to the third floor, and when she was tired she'd stop and pee on the stairs It's a memory, but it's also a photograph memory, a smell I photograph women rather a lot; they come out better for me I spent my early childhood away from Palermo, in Naples, Civitavecchia, and Trieste But I didn't pay much mind to all that In Palermo I was sure I would never be a housewife So I started to write for the newspaper L'Ora, more taken with the city than the profession of journalism For L'Ora newspaper, I reported on all sorts of news, ranging from beauty contests to sports In 1974, as soon as I returned from Milan, where I was living, a terrible Mafia war broke out in Palermo that started with the murder of Colonel Russo and then the secretary of the Christian Democrat Party, Michele Reina, and then Boris Giuliano But what was happening was too much, it was really humanly unbearable I was out of my mind, crazy with anger at seeing Boris Giuliano, a good police officer - finally we had a good police officer in Palermo - lying in a pool of blood When they killed Judge Chinnici I didn't go out of the house Now I don't have much time for photography anymore, but I continue to work in photography, in the sense that if someone makes a request, I print it, I'm in the dark room I'm bewitched by Sicily I can't stay away from Palermo for more than ten days, even if I'm on vacation I can't use very complicated cameras, I'm not fond of them And you have to be quick, you have to participate I photograph tragedy even though I don't like tragedies I owe the greatest satisfaction in my life to photography There was a time when photographers in Palermo were considered people to avoid Then there are other satisfactions, smaller but no less important Then one day I decided to become involved in politics I even comprehend the Mafia, I understand it I'm sad for the people in the Mafia I think they are the prisoners of rules, prisoners of false myths, of pagan gods that are money, naturally, but are also certain rules within society In the middle of all this confusion it's difficult to distinguish justice and truth Some women are talking now; they collaborate with the justice system Every time I pass in front of the Ucciardone prison, I have a deep sense of pain, because I think that murderers, criminals, drug dealers, everything, are there inside I'm attracted by the silences that scream out, by the speechless uproar, by the stillness that suddenly emerges in the middle of rebellions Sicily disturbs and makes you angry In silence But never in peace

Discuss the legacy of Letizia Battaglia. Touch on the importance of her photography during the violent periods of the Second Mafia War and Maxi Trials, the most important points she makes in her "Testimony" ( in Mafia and Outlaw Stories, and how she has changed today. What do you think of her doing "re-elaborations" of her old photographs?

I remember a little old woman who used to come to bring us eggs She'd climb the stairs up to the third floor, and when she was tired she'd stop and pee on the stairs She wasn't ashamed She didn't even turn around to see if there was someone watching her She was tired and had to pee This is a sweet memory, strangely sweet I can still smell the strange odour of pee, disinfectant, and chicken coop I see her from above, small and stooped over, lift her long black skirt up in a bundle, squat down and pee It's a memory, but it's also a photograph memory, a smell This is the first image that comes to my mind when I think of Palermo An image with no shame, just like this city And even now, if I think of a snapshot capable of synthesizing the realities of Palermo, I think of a woman I photograph women rather a lot; they come out better for me I satisfy an intuition that pushes me to photograph women more than men I live this intuition like a meeting of energies My energy instinctively meets the energy of the women I photograph I spent my early childhood away from Palermo, in Naples, Civitavecchia, and Trieste When I returned to Palermo I was eleven, and I suffered a lot My parents had decided to take away all the freedoms I had In Trieste, at ten years old, I rode my bike around alone When I arrived in Palermo, it wasn't possible anymore because the rhythm of women's lives was different here It wasn't right to walk in the streets after a certain hour It wasn't right to be out in public with boys It wasn't right to get too familiar with outsiders Too many things weren't right for women to do But I didn't pay much mind to all that Back then I already did what I thought was right I've always been an anti-conformist Conformism made me suffer a lot Times have changed now, but in the 1960s all that counted in Sicily was what other people said Whispers and murmurs persecuted me the entire time I was growing up In Palermo I was sure I would never be a housewife The city piqued my curiosity, pushed me to go outside my house I felt the need to live in close contact with the city in order to understand its moods Palermo fascinated me I felt it was inevitable that I would fall in love with it But before yielding entirely, I wanted to study it well And the easiest way to do that was to start discovering what was happening every day in its streets, in its homes So I started to write for the newspaper L'Ora, more taken with the city than the profession of journalism Then I realized that if the written text was accompanied with photographs the finished work was better And I became a photographer I wrote the articles and photographed the people I interviewed And I ended up falling more in love with photography than writing It's agreat love that has taken up my whole life, born a little for fun and a little by necessity And a little by chance, like the beginning of all the great love stories For L'Ora newspaper, I reported on all sorts of news, ranging from beauty contests to sports I photographed soccer matches when it was fairly strange to see a woman on the sidelines And then I was a news reporter during Palermo's most terrible years, the hardest years, when no one expected yet that the Mafia would dare go so far: killing a chief of police, a judge, a baby, killing journalists First it happened to Judge Scaglione, the murder of an excellent cadaver In 1974, as soon as I returned from Milan, where I was living, a terrible Mafia war broke out in Palermo that started with the murder of Colonel Russo and then the secretary of the Christian Democrat Party, Michele Reina, and then Boris Giuliano I didn't expect it, I didn't expect to see so much blood I was proud of working as a photojournalist I felt it was an adventurous job, full of emotions, unexpected events, encounters A restless job for restless people like me But what was happening was too much, it was really humanly unbearable Sometimes I would rush from one city to another to photograph people who'd been murdered Photographing a trial was also very hard for me A man in handcuffs or behind bars had to be captured in an image and this frightened me In any case, it was the fruit of a sick, wrong society I was out of my mind, crazy with anger at seeing Boris Giuliano, a good police officer - finally we had a good police officer in Palermo - lying in a pool of blood And we didn't photograph him; they didn't let us photograph him And it was a good thing Seeing him there in the small corner, near the cash register in the Café Lux on the floor, was too great a pain I was astonished, I was really angry When they killed Judge Chinnici I didn't go out of the house It was eight in the morning when L'Ora newspaper called, and the editor told me to rush right away because something very serious had happened And he added, 'The are five people killed.' I said no, I'm not going to photograph these dead people I don't want to do it I couldn't do it I didn't want to do it My conscience and my stomach refused to do it. I didn't go, I didn't see Chinnici lying there in pieces Now I don't have much time for photography anymore, but I continue to work in photography, in the sense that if someone makes a request, I print it, I'm in the dark room What I feel I'll do soon won't involve news anymore I want to tell my own story through the life of this city or other cities too Nobody says I only want to photograph Palermo, but I certainly want to transmit positive energy, I would like to draw strength out of the photographs And I think I can find it in women Yes, this hope which is strength and is a positive energy - I will look for it among women I'm bewitched by Sicily The easiest thing to do would have been to go away And God only knows how many occasions I had to abandon it But I feel like something really holds me here It's the land that attracts me, it's the sky, it's the sun, it's the possibility to return to being what we once were, a cultured people, a people who respected its land, its foundations I'm attracted by the possibility of rebuilding, of working with these people, my people I can't stay away from Palermo for more than ten days, even if I'm on vacation I go to New York, or even farther away, and I have to come back after ten days That's the limit I can't stay away any longer than that I often travel back and forth from Palermo around the world I often remain in its reality Because even when I go away, Palermo remains inside me I can't use very complicated cameras, I'm not fond of them My photographs come out well even though I know very few technical things and always use a small wide-angle lens I don't use telephoto lenses, I don't want to I have a very basic relationship with the camera, which has become almost like a hand I don't want a lot of electronic things If I have a camera that focuses automatically, my photograph comes out out of focus It comes out better when I do it myself I take photographs more with my mind and heart than with technique And you have to be quick, you have to participate I don't believe you have to be detached, I get deep inside things For example, I remember when Franco Zecchin and I would go to take the same photograph Mine would be tragic, and his would be something ironic And it was the same situation One time we went to photograph a woman alcoholic He drew out the moment when there was something funny going on around this woman, some children playing Instead, I took a photograph in which she has a tear on her face I photograph tragedy even though I don't like tragedies I'm a woman who loves life and would like life to be happiness for everyone I get very angry when I see some kinds of happiness built on the unhappiness of others In my photographs, I represent the former with irony and disdain, and the latter with tension and uneasiness I owe the greatest satisfaction in my life to photography I won the most important award in the world, in New York, the Eugene Smith It was a milestone because I'll always be in the history of photography And also because this award was given to me precisely for my work in Sicily It's a recognition after years and years of hard work, when there was no gratification, only pain and reproaches Police, victims' relatives,judges, everyone spitting in my face There was a time when photographers in Palermo were considered people to avoid To the police, they were criminals, and for criminals, the police The Eugene Smith award restored my dignity And at the same time, through the affirmation of my professionalism, it rewarded an entire group, restoring it in everyone's eyes Then there are other satisfactions, smaller but no less important When I go back home, I develop the negatives and feel that I have perhaps realized a dream, that there was a look, something in the middle of confusion that I was able to catch And I felt that I was in harmony with that person, who may be a little girl, an old woman I develop the film, make the proof, print it, and discover I've made a good photo I feel I've added another small stone, that this thing will remain to tell the story of an epoch Then one day I decided to become involved in politics I was city councillor of Palermo and a regional deputy I was convinced that photography alone wasn't enough to denounce the deterioration of this city It was necessary to add stronger things in order to make people understand where we were going However, it was a sad, painful experience I don't like politics I'm not at ease, I don't feel happy in politics In my opinion, politics is done in an old-fashioned way There's too much hate, too much rancor, too much jealousy I don't like this world of politics, which, in reality, is the mirror of the society we live in The profiteers and turncoats pull the strings of a system made for themselves There's no room for the idealists, for the pure I even comprehend the Mafia, I understand it But I'm much more angry with the politicians of this land, who allowed people who could have been normal to become mafiosi, Mafia soldiers Because they were pushed by politics into becoming mafiosi When power is corrupt, you play with power and understand that in order to get things you have to be corrupt I'm sad for the people in the Mafia I think they are the prisoners of rules, prisoners of false myths, of pagan gods that are money, naturally, but are also certain rules within society And politics has legitimized these principles, making them their own Before, the mafiosi supported the politicians to manage the contracts for public works, to have protection Then the mafiosi didn't trust them anymore and they became politicians themselves In the middle of all this confusion it's difficult to distinguish justice and truth Power is a masculine way of thinking, into which women have also fallen I used to believe that women couldn't be inside the Mafia Instead, today, I understand that they're in it up to their necks Their role is to keep quiet Some women are talking now; they collaborate with the justice system But they always do it to avenge a son, a lover, or a husband They're notable to kill and they take their revenge this way, by accusing people And if they don't hold a gun in their hands, it's not for lack of courage, it's the rules that say men have to be the ones who shoot Every time I pass in front of the Ucciardone prison, I have a deep sense of pain, because I think that murderers, criminals, drug dealers, everything, are there inside But I think that if one of the men had found work, justice, something different would certainly have happened in his life A lot of men joined the Mafia because they didn't have other options Children who didn't find different games than guns, blackmail, drugs Than silence I'm attracted by the silences that scream out, by the speechless uproar, by the stillness that suddenly emerges in the middle of rebellions It's a silence that screams in silence I would like instead to look for a kind of peace that is something different from silence Not a peace born of resignation, but a peace that has been won Instead, I'm forced to photograph harsh images that disturb In a troubled land like this, there is silence but almost never peace Sicily disturbs and makes you angry In silence But never in peace

"A Taste of Justice": Digital Media and Libera Terra's Antimafia Public Pedagogy of Agrarian Dissent

On 14 May 2014, National Public Radio featured the first of several instalments of a new season of Hidden Kitchens, produced by "the kitchen sisters," award-winning journalists Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva The Sicilian tradition of non-violent dissent against the mafia, revitalized under the direction of don Ciotti, grounds itself in the symbolic and physical practices of organic farming and cooperative economics that characterize an agrarian history in Sicily that has long valued what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri label as "the commons" in their work Empire If, as Hardt and Negri (2001) argue, "those who are against" the empire's pursuit to exploit and dominate the multitude "must continually attempt to construct a new body and a new life" (214), then Libera Terra might be understood as a collective of ideal citizen subjects who refuse to submit to the corruption imposed by generations of mafia infiltration into politics, social life, and the economy If, as Hardt and Negri (2001) argue, "those who are against" the empire's pursuit to exploit and dominate the multitude "must continually attempt to construct a new body and a new life" (214), then Libera Terra might be understood as a collective of ideal citizen subjects who refuse to submit to the corruption imposed by generations of mafia infiltration into politics, social life, and the economy In "Creating Counterpublics against the Italian Mafia" (2013), Baris Cayli conducts an astute study of Libera's use of web-based media to create counterpublic spaces, and examines how the antimafia organization uses social media to exercise its commitment to democratic ideals of access, inclusion, deliberation, and participation in projects directed towards and engaged in social renewal The fact that many of Libera Terra's activities use social networking to promote its projects raises serious questions, particularly given the ways in which the mafia makes use of social networking to leverage their wages and wage their wars, capitalizing, as noted by Robin Pickering-Iazzi in the introduction to this volume, on the multiple ways in which multimedia platforms work to expand not only their profit but also their ideal public image The "low-risk" political involvement Dean describes is also critiqued by Malcolm Gladwell (2010) and Evgeny Morozov (2009), both of whom speak to the argument of "slacktivism" as a form of what Morozov describes as "feel-good online activism that has zero political or social impact.In this chapter, I draw on critical theory of contemporary media and communicative capitalism to explore the ways in which Libera Terra uses social networking on their Facebook site to extend the memories of an agrarian history of antimafia protest to contemporary antimafia activism My analysis defines transitional justice as a set of judicial and non-judicial measures that are implemented to redress legacies of conflict and state repression In this chapter, I argue that the process of transitional justice calls for radical approaches to narrative and to teaching that are exemplified by the public pedagogy of Libera Terra This legacy combines cultural production and spatial justice with participatory politics, in turn complicating critiques of the effectiveness digital media has on the work of cultural renewal

Introduction. Mediating Italian Antimafia Culture: (Cyber)spatialities of Legality

No to women breastfeeding their infants, yes to mafia bosses Taking full advantage of one's own space on Facebook to remember [mafia victims'] sacrifices and their battles against organized crime could be a good opportunity to oppose this new sad phenomenon that is invading the web, apart from the fact the mafia may be carefully orchestrating it In 2009, as Facebook approached its fifth anniversary, a heated controversy exploded over its decision to remove visual images of women breastfeeding their infants, deemed pornographic, yet allow pages idolizing sanguinary Italian mafia bosses to circulate freely in the network territory The positions taken, respectively, by Facebook and various Italian antimafia camps on pages dedicated to mafia bosses that make up part of the network geography epitomize critical differences between perspectives on the mafia produced in the United States and Italy, which derive largely from the diverse social, economic, political, and cultural histories of the crime organizations informing them The territorial battle lines constituted by tactics producing criminal sociospatial relations in the interrelated material and virtual environs bring into relief some of the reasons why the invention and application of web-based antimafia practices warrant critical attention Of hardly negligible significance, the antimafia networks and communities attract thousands of visitors every day With the aim of producing a collective cultural revolution, the members of the antimafia movement take as axiomic that such civil transformation must begin with each citizen practising the culture of legality Addiopizzo calls upon merchants to refuse to pay the extortion money, becoming pizzo free and being listed on its website, and consumers to assert their right and responsibility to wield their moral and economic power through purchasing goods and services only from "clean" businesses through the practices of critical consumption (consumo critico) and ethical tourism (Turismoetico) Despite the significant roles that web-based media perform in the fight against the mafia and creation of artefacts, behaviours, and collectivities of legality, they have received relatively little attention in studies on Italian antimafia movements and initiatives Conceived as exploratory chartings of what is largely terra incognita, the studies written for this volume map, explore, and interpret diversified manifestations of antimafia culture of legality that encompass, for instance, digital storytelling and witnessing, rap music, remediations of the popular television series Crime Novel (inspired by the best-selling novel and blockbuster film), photography in various modes and sites of diffusion, and the online community Libera Terra, which is a branch of the Libera organization By foregrounding the term mediating, I also want to situate this collection in the line of thought developed by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin in Remediation (2000), whose insights on mediation and remediation in new media challenge tendencies in antimafia studies, and mafiology for that matter, to see Internet-based practices and initiatives as insubstantial The networked artefacts and sites of the Italian culture of legality examined here are intimately linked with the changing social, economic, and political conditions of their production and, more specifically, practices of resistance in daily living that constitute the long-standing tradition of antimafia movements, which dates back to the 1800s The resultant language and culture of legality inscribed through such medial operations challenge the mafia fashionings of language which, as Salvatore Di Piazza (2010) rigorously demonstrates, perform central functions in identity construction within and beyond the criminal associations

In Sicily, a summer camp for anti-mafia journalism

ON A HOT SUMMER DAY this past July in Catania, Sicily, 21-year-old Mariya Atanasova sat with three other young women in the shade of a tree, talking about a murder Atanasova and her acquaintances were in Catania for the first edition of "Journalism Tools to Fight Organized Crime," a summer camp on anti-Mafia journalism organized by Arci Catania, an NGO that promotes active citizenship, with seed funding from the European Commission The hands-on classes were led by local journalists from I Siciliani Giovani (Italian for "The Young Sicilians"), an investigative magazine founded in 1983 by Giuseppe Fava, a journalist from Catania who was killed by the Mafia on the first anniversary of the magazine's debut "Today, stories are often written from the comfort of an office desk," says Giovanni Caruso, deputy editor in chief of the magazine and trainer at the summer camp "I think it's important to teach younger generations the impact journalism investigations have on our society, since this is something they don't teach in schools And that's a pity, because still today journalists are under threat while delivering an important social service, and not just in Sicily but all over Europe "The murders of Daphne Caruana Galizia, in Malta in 2017, and of Ján Kuciak in Slovakia and Marinova in Bulgaria, in 2018, have brought renewed attention to issues of impunity and journalist safety in Europe According to the Council of Europe's 2019 annual report on media freedom in the EU, Italy is among those countries with the highest number of potential impunities, the same as in the Russian Federation Organized crime remains a leading threat to press freedom; almost 200 Italian reporters currently live under police protection This worrying context inspired Mariaelena Urso, an activist and Arci board member, to organize the journalism camp Sicily, which is home to organized criminal networks operating within as well as beyond Italian borders, has also served as a laboratory for anti-Mafia activism, through organizations such as Addiopizzo and the Fava Foundation Urso wanted a venue that would carry symbolic meaning Arci eventually selected Scidà's Garden, a property that once belonged to Nitto Santapaola, one of Catania's most prominent Mafia bosses In early 2018, the property was returned to the city and transformed into a memorial for Mafia victims,journalists in particular The space—a secret garden hiding in the basement of a three-story building in a quiet residential area—takes its name from a local judge who worked on Mafia cases to save youngsters from involvement with criminal groups "Catania has very few places that celebrate the fight against the Mafia," says Francesca Andreozzi, granddaughter of Giuseppe Fava and vice president of the Fava Foundation, among the associations currently in charge of the garden "For some people here, the Mafia never existed This is why we decided to build a 'house of memory' to remember the lawyers and journalists that fought corruption, by building a small multimedia archive containing documents, photos, videos, and posters on the history of Mafia in Sicily The camp features discussion groups on ethics in journalism and lectures from Sicilian reporters who offer tips on organized-crime coverage, as well as practical sessions aimed at honing participants' reporting skills.Ugne Martuseviciute, who is 17, says films such as The Godfather shaped her more youthful, exotic, naive ideas about the Italian Mafia At the Scidà's Garden residence, on a wall in a narrow hallway, Atanasova noticed the cover of a magazine published July 19, 1992—27 years previous, to the day The "Sicilian Mafia is probably the most famous criminal organization in Europe," Atanasova says Atanasova—like Marinova, the journalist whose murder so alarmed her—is from Bulgaria As the camp closed for another summer, a small neighborhood crowd gathered to bid farewell to the young journalists Andreozzi, Fava's granddaughter, flashed a proud smile while interacting with the young reporters "In the era of fast and fake news," she said, "my dream is that new generations of journalists will not forget the importance of field reporting, to carry on the legacy of those journalists we lost along the way, trying to keep us informed and free

Testimony by RITA ATRIA

Partanna, 12 November 1991 -It's four in the afternoon Partanna, 16 November 1991 -I called Signora Annina1 to tell her that the Partanna carabinieri asked too many questions about Nicola selling drugs Partanna, 20 November 1991 -One in the morning and I can't sleep Rome, 21 December 1991 -I'm starting to write again because you can never be too careful 12 January 1992 -It's almost nine at night, I'm sad and demoralized, perhaps because I can't dream anymore, in my eyes I see so much darkness and so much blackness Rome, 1992 -I never wanted much in life Rome, 1992 -You know, I'm writing a book, and I had Angelo and Michele Santoro read it, both of them assured me that when it's done they'll help me publish it Rome, 1992 -Who knows why you never have enough love Rome, 1992 -Woman would I be if I were really woman: -What detail differentiates me and a woman? -Maybe I haven't experienced the pleasures of the flesh yet? -I didn't realize how important that could be Rome, 1992 -It's incomprehensible how a smile could fascinate you, how two eyes could make you fall in love, how a silence could make you feel bad, how a caress could make you quiver, how a voice could invade your heart, how a man's desire could reawaken your senses Rome, 1992 -I really believe that Culicchia will never go to jail Rome, 1992 -A lie is just a beautiful, made-up woman Rome, 1992 -It is night and in the sky there is only silence and immense darkness the city around me is still awake and full of lights -I listen but don't hear -That city is too distant from me or perhaps I from her -Whichever it may be, not knowing what city is mine only makes me understand how sweet is the pain that ties us to its memories Rome, 1992 -To wait for whom Rome, 1992 -Only with time will you understand only with water will you purify yourself only with a mantle will you cover yourself but with the passing of days and night show and from what will you protect yourself? -Perhaps from great disappointments from great suffering perhaps from the nos said to people from the looks that accuse you for what you believe is right Rome, 1992 -A sliver of deep darkness invades you, but this time it isn't fear that prevents you from seeing Rome, 1992 -It's a long night and there are millions of stars in the sky, one more enchanting than the other Rome, 1992 -Now that Borsellino is dead, no one can understand what emptiness he left in my life -Everyone is afraid, but as for me the only thing I'm afraid of is that the Mafia State will win and those poor fools battling against windmills will be killed -Borsellino, you died for what you believed in but without you I am dead Final Exam Essay -In our eyes, the death of any other person would have been expected, we would almost have been impassive before that natural phenomenon, death -But really, they will have to protect themselves only from their friends - members of parliament, lawyers, magistrates, men and women who in the eyes of others have an image of high social prestige and whom no one will ever be able to unmask -You see, with Falcone's death those men wanted to tell us that they will always win, that they are the strongest, that they have the power to kill anyone -The only hope is to never give in The Story of My Life -A large mirror in which to look at what you believe you see, where you try to understand but you don't understand -Her father was happy to know that the stork, which I believed in as a little girl, would bring him someone to lean on in his old age, as he used to call her -She was born by chance, after a son who was ten years old and a daughter who was five, to a father and mother who couldn't love each other -That little girl grew up faster than her years and for the people close to her she had wisdom to spare -The years went by, years of arguing, even about something that wasn't put in the right place, arguing because the children weren't very obedient, or because of the hateful, harsh wife, with anyone, with relatives, friends, in-laws -After being beaten with a belt and made to go the entire day without any food, she had to remain standing for about eighteen hours without ever sitting down or leaning on a piece of furniture, she had to stand up straight on her own legs -Instead, it is just something inhuman

Amelia Crisantino from Searching for Palermo

Sitting in an armchair, her feet resting on a small table set in front of her, with a cucumber hydra-toner mask on her face, Ida Benelli was flipping through a magazine in the kitchen of her home The latest summer fashions The magazine had articles on current news, fashion, and culture for the up-to-date, dynamic woman, so it also alluded to the less desirable aspect of the city The mayor standing among children in a school on the outskirts of the city She stopped reading, set the magazine on her legs, and lit a cigarette, lost in thought One rarely heard about them if the case did not explode wide open, the silence of people around them was guaranteed To move to another home, to move to another neighbourhood She had been in one of these dream homes one afternoon, to play cards.She looked at the clock to check how much time was left for the mask, still a couple of minutes To become rich Certainly one can always steal, but it's horribly risky Become a money lender Blackmail Her eyes still closed, Ida Benelli stretched in the chair and smiled at herself while she thought, 'It would really be exciting A beautiful blackmail scheme What it takes to succeed: a) Do everything possible so the person being blackmailed doesn't know who you are, otherwise your fate is sealed b) A disguised voice on the phone. A place that's impossible to control for the money drop. The train station? In the end, you have to come out in the open at all costs c) Establish contact without making any mistakes d) Act alone, never trust an accomplice. They're the lowest sort She was not persuaded There's certainly heroin, a sure thing for making money She thought of the story that Signora Giuseppina had told her in tears, about a niece of hers caught carrying drugs The ideal thing would be to invest money in drug trafficking, staying far removed and clean, untouchable The only problem is how to do it, who to give the money to, to invest She got up and went to wash off her face Ida Benelli gave a start as she read the headline that the L'Ora newspaper ran on the first page She leaned against the wall, stopping to read, something a respectable woman should never do Ida Benelli had a very quick mind and was practical by nature, two things that had always come in useful Mariannina's brother is dead.It certainly was a blow, but with one brother dead, there are still five other brothers and two sisters I'm going to pay a visit on my old friend, offer my solidarity, and see if there's a way for me to get into trafficking But if it goes well, as long as I'm alive I'm sitting pretty

Conclusion

Sociologist Amanda Lagerkvist (2013) observes that because "memory work in the digital age is taken up in the face of three challenges, which deal with the temporality of instantaneity, an all-pervasive networked individualism and concomitant technological capacities that subject memory to endless revision, and an accelerated blurring of the private and the public," one might assume that this corroborates "the sense in which there is a vanishing and ephemeral dimension to all digital culture, as it is situated in the absolute present" Yet, on the contrary, Lagerkvist argues that "in the teeming mediated publicness of death, new cultures of memory may also contribute to the paradoxical solidification of these existential terrains It cannot be denied that from the vantage point of human experience, there appears to be a surprising steadiness, permanence, and unexpected rootedness in these aspects of web memorialisation" Lagerkvist's (2013) claims about the effects of commemorative practices on the web have particular resonance in an antimafia activist context and can be illustrated by the desire to create a "casa" (home), which implies "concrete place," within cyberspace While typically the types of commemoration that exist on the web ("cybershrines," Facebook tribute pages, blogs, and sites like YouTube) exist somewhere between the permanent and ephemeral, and self-consciously allow for a portability, fluidity, internationality, and a collaborative element that non-virtual forms of archiving and commemoration preclude, a "Casa della Memoria" also implies a return to the concrete, the tangible, the core structure of a geographical community This tension between the concrete and all-encompassing, and the ephemeral and fragmented, between the historical and traditional, and the new and resistant characterizes the Casamemoria Vittimemafia project, and reflects an important aspect of communities attempting to commemorate and grieve persistent, ongoing traumas Life in these types of communities is so fragile, death so ever-present (evidenced by the fact that in the Casamemoria Vittimemafia calendar almost each day of the year can be linked with multiple victims of mafia violence) that the goal is not self-consciously ephemeral ways of memorializing Rather, they seek to create fluid and ever-expanding memorials, reminding the community that memories are grounded in ancient rituals and concrete places What I propose, then, is that the creators of Casamemoria Vittimemafia participate in an antimafia activist network that covers both the mainstream, and the local or esoteric, place and cyberspace Casamemoria's alternative memory work is becoming part of a larger system of commemorative practices that have so far succeeded, after prolonged struggles, in creating spaces for figures like Lea Garofalo, who, though she became a witness of justice, was left unprotected by the state and met a gruesome death at the hands of her mafioso husband in 1999 Lea is remembered, along with seventy-two other victims, ranging from police to those who refused to pay extortion money to reckless teenagers, on Vittimemafia's archive page for the month of November Meanwhile, in the non-virtual world, Lea Garofalo has recently been commemorated with place names at the urging of groups like Vittimemafia For example, the town of Rosate (Milan) dedicated "Via Lea Garofalo," just around the corner from "Via Giovanni Falcone," in November 2014 In the town of Lissone (Lombardy), a small piazza, renamed "Largo Lea Garofalo - Vittime delle mafie" and located adjacent to the Croce-Dante school complex, was inaugurated in March 2015, scheduled to coincide with the "Day of memory and duty in memory of innocent mafia victims." In addition, this attention to Lea's story coincided with director Marco Tullio Giordana's made-for-television film Lea, which premiered on Rai1 in November 2015 Cultural products like the websites, place names, and film referenced above are a testament to the value of a multi-pronged approach to creating an inclusive "culture of legality" that redefines the term "hero" and respects and mourns all victims of Italy's mafias

What do you think is happening in Palermo in the 1980s, based on the description given by Ida Benelli on pg. 107-108?

The reference to the housewives ending up in the newspapers likely alludes to the pronounced trend in the 1980s, when women, generally of the lower class, with large families, were used as 'mules' to transport drugs from Palermo to New York

organized crime in Italy, the glass ceiling has shattered"

The results of this have been unprecedented, as a few years ago an Italian matriarch was put onto Italy's list of the thirty most wanted criminals There are several examples of women who have been arrested and indicated for their roles with the Italian mafia another case is in Sicily, where in 1999, "Sicilian police arrested Concetta Scalisi, an alleged 'godmother' wanted for three murders"

Critical Itineraries

The studies featured in this volume are arranged according to a conceptual progression The very conceptualization and giving of body to cyberspatialities of legality as the subject of philosophical inquiry are examined in chapter 1 by Carla Bagnoli, whose "Structural Modes of Recognition and Virtual Forms of Empowerment: Towards a New Antimafia Culture" problematizes presentations of cyberspace as emblematic of Marc Augé's model of "non-place." Baris Cayli's "When a Journalist Defies More Than the Mafia: The Legacy of Giuseppe Fava and Italian Antimafia Culture" (chapter 2) constructs an important historical frame for understanding the values and professional practices forming the lived geographies of web-based antimafia journalists, who frequently serve as witnesses providing testimony, knowledge, and future memory in the battle against the mafias The conceiving, employment, and roles of Italian social networks in the embattled spaces of conflict between antimafia and mafia forces have been largely overlooked in mafia and media studies The complexities of antimafia makings of new memory - in terms of materials, remediating techniques, and artefacts - and their relations to the right to memory and silence are brought into high definition by Boylan in her chapter Irremediable loss, the labour of mourning, and hope as truths driving the production, posting, viewing, and sharing of witnessing texts form the interpretative field for the timely critical intervention performed by Giovanna Summerfield in her chapter "Per non dimenticare: Antimafia Digital Storytelling and Reflections." The contradictory attractions exerted by antimafia and mafia culture forms the overarching problem in Dana Renga's "Remediating the Banda della Magliana: Debating Sympathetic Perpetrators in the Digital Age" The particular ways in which music and song figure in the creation of communities in built or metaphorical cities, the nation, and virtual spaces has garnered increasing critical attention of late, particularly in the frame of networked society and culture Maiello fashions historical and critical contexts in which to situate "Nu Juorn Buon" as a product and producer of viral antimafia culture These varied critical mediations of the heterogeneous range of antimafia operations, modes, and forms of cultural production that enact cyberspatialities of legality perform timely interventions as they challenge prominent images of Italy, Italian citizens, the antimafia movement, and new digital media as well By charting diverse remediating antimafia places on the itineraries of hybridized geographies numbers of Italians live, these studies also put into question current notions that the antimafia has largely become an institutionalized part of the state, in Attilio Bolzoni's (2015) words, "a feigned antimafia" that is submissive, malleable, and concerned with making a business of the traumatic memory of antimafia activists The creation and circulation of such artefacts construct portals for developing new perspectives on such critical concepts as media witnessing, visual and acoustic memory spaces, silence and the right to speak out, as well as the drives situating Internet users in networks of pleasure and production, which contribute to the geographies of everyday life today

'Women in the mafia'

This is a phrase which construes paradoxical images Women are considered completely separate from the mafia organization, and its supposedly male-only membership However, over the last thirty years, and especially since the nineties, women have not only become involved with the mafia they have also rapidly moved up the status ladder Italian women as wives, mothers, sisters and daughters may be described in terms of female innocence and naivety, which could be mistaken for passiveness, submissiveness or maybe even a lack of knowledge

Giuseppe Fava's Three Ethical Codes: Truth, Freedom, and Justice

Three years before his death, Fava introduced new epistemological dynamics into journalism as a profession On 11 October 1981, he stated, "I have an ethical concept of journalism" Fava's ethical approach to journalism was neither superficial nor illusory If five million Sicilians rebelled against the Mafia, nothing would happen at all Fava's recognition of the vital importance of state power and its institutions to dismantle mafia organizations and unflinching critiques concerning the state-mafia collusion indicate his analytical acuity and commitment to rebuilding civil society On 5 April 1976, Fava's use of the metaphor of cancer to express the character of the mafia and its sociocultural effects drew public attention He tells readers, the mafia is not simply crime committed in the background of extortion, corruption, and bad governance This definition of the mafia invokes the mafia's omnipotent status as a disease that prevents attempts to attain truth, freedom, and justice Fava's analysis of the Catania syndrome draws out its many symptomatic elements and effects, which include the socio-economic gap between the rich and the poor in the urban centre and peripheries of the city The changing character of the urban settlement pushed the poor people of Catania into the maze of streets and crumbling buildings of the new neighborhoods such as San Berillo, Librino and Monte Po The social realities of the Catania syndrome lie in the dependency and submission of the residents of Catania to the mafia's enduring power You can either accept or deny it, but you cannot change the fact that ninety percent of the business and commercial sector pay extortion money to the mafia clans in Catania Fava's multidimensional struggle to articulate the social and cultural dynamics of Sicily reached beyond his articles in the newspapers It is evident in the documentary that Fava's ethical code of truth in particular, and how it is exercised in a free society, depends on the factual realities lived and known by the local people and the free dissemination of the facts regarding them Although local struggle is necessary to defy the territorial power of the mafia, Fava was among the first to publicly recognize that the crime organizations also constituted a national problem As part of Fava's socially committed journalism, several articles demonstrate his deep concern over the way truths are distorted as deceptions in Sicily The disinterest shown by the public reaction in northern Italian towns towards the ongoing scandals in the southern part of the country was pervasive In addition to putting the mafia's economic affairs under public scrutiny, Fava also drew attention to the extensive and deep social networks of the mafias that eventually paralysed both Catania and its residents in the 1970s We live in a country stained with blood Fava continued underscoring his daily mission to renew Sicilian culture, driven by diverse emotions such as anger, love, and pride disseminated through the articles, reviews, and opinions in Il Giornale del Sud Il Giornale del Sud unquestionably became one of Fava's pioneering venues for spreading information about the mafiosi and denouncing the scandalous political-criminal nexus, as well as mafia expansion and diversification in business Although the recent attention attracted by Roberto Saviano's 2008 non-fiction novel Gomorrah, applauded for the way it exposed the day-to-day business of the camorra in Campania, may lead one to believe that crime organization is a relatively recent development, in 1983 Fava published a detailed inquiry into the expansion of both Cosa Nostra and the camorra in terms of geographic territories and criminal undertakings with the Italian state and its institutions I Siciliani gained numerous enemies and rivals in a very short time They also testify to the mafia's failure to silence news media in the face of what I suggest are serious threats to the diverse mafias in Italy today posed by web-based media

The Ethical Legacy of Giuseppe Fava and Its Influence on the New Generation of Antimafia Journalism and Culture

Today there are numerous antimafia media establishments across Italy I Siciliani giovani endeavours to realize the mission of Giuseppe Fava and his newspaper I Siciliani The role of I Siciliani giovani has vital importance, as underscored by the recent scandals that broke in Italy in March 2015, and raised the problematic issue of how certain individuals benefited from their associations with the antimafia movement, using them as cover for their businesses and collaborations with the local mafiosi These two shameful incidents are tragic developments since both Montante and Helg have appeared many times at antimafia events and have expressed their efforts to fight the mafia Rita Borsellino (2015), the sister of the assassinated magistrate Paolo Borsellino, made a sobering statement about the scandals and antimafia movement, saying that the movement sprang up spontaneously in Sicily on the wave of emotion after the massacres of 1992 Although the Montante and Helg cases have damaged the reputation of the antimafia fight, they have also prompted immediate, salutory self-scrutiny, enabled largely by web-based media 1 Eliminate bank secrecy 2 Confiscate all mafia assets and goods, including those attained through corruption and tax evasion 3 Assign all confiscated goods to the cooperatives of young labourers; assist the people who support cooperatives 4 Effective registration of the confiscated property 5 Sanction relocations, the abuse of insecurity, and the failure to comply with the Statute of Workers' Rights or working regulations 6 Achieve separation of the financial and industrial capital; cap on investments in publishing; enforce the Tobin tax (a tax on all spot conversions of one currency into another to punish short-term financial round-trip excursions into another currency) 7 Public management of the essential public services (schools, universities, defence, water, energy, technological structures, international credit) 8 Support the project of the national safety of the territory, as an economic driver especially in the South; prohibition of other uncontrolled developments; banning polluting industries; restructuring of existing land and land reclamation at the expense of the polluter 9 Improve control of the territory in high-intensity mafia areas 10 Strengthen application of Article 41 of the Constitution Article 41 reads: "Private-sector economic initiative is freely exercised It cannot be conducted in conflict with social usefulness or in such a manner that could damage safety, liberty and human dignity The law shall provide for appropriate programs and controls so that public and private-sector economic activity may be oriented and coordinated for social purposes." I Siciliani giovani's campaign against the recent scandals and its news about the risks of the mafia both at the regional and national level show how they put into practice the elements of Fava's socially committed journalism The foundation of Libera Informazione must be located in the history of Libera, which is the largest non-state antimafia organization and network in the country The structure of Libera Informazione's website is organized into eight sections: breaking news located on the home page, interviews, videos, publications and archives, investigative files, the network of the foundation, and the news section for each region of Italy The network of Libera Informazione is a significant instrument for making the antimafia movement stronger and more diversified Both I Siciliani giovani and Libera Informazione are indispensable instruments of democratic formations in web-based media, functioning to raise concerns in the name of the public while fighting against the mafia The mafia poses certain risks to targeted victims, including journalists, through its relentless violence and threats that are a more dramatic deterrent at the local level where the mafia has a strong power base Public opinion cases regarding crime generally do not take into account the role of community influence on individual reactions These antimafia initiatives in new media frequently direct public attention to the poor administration of state institutions and egregious political impotence that empower mafia clans comprised by Cosa Nostra, the camorra, 'ndrangheta, and the United Sacred Crown Fava was among the relatively few Italian journalists who ventured to defy the mafia publicly in the 1980s This is the reason that the fight against the mafia is grounded in the project to renew Italy through democratic channels, civil resistance, and bottom-to-top social mobilization, markedly empowered by the increasing employment of web-based media

List and analyze the key ideas of A Quiet Life (Una vita tranquilla) such as the meaning of the title, what the film says about the relationship between Mafia Family vs Blood Family, the significance of the film's ending, etc.

Una vita tranquilla ("A Quiet Life" in U.S. but which can also be translated as a calm,tranquil or nice life) is a 2010 Italian neo-noir film directed by Claudio Cupellini It premiered at the 2010 Rome International Film Festival, in which Toni Servillo was awarded best actor Characters: Rosario Russo - Italian emigrant from Naples who has lived in Germany for over a decade and is a chef and owner of a hotel/restaurant Renate - Rosario's German wife and co-owner of the restaurant/hotel Mathias - Rosarios's young son Claudio - an Italian cook working in Rosario's kitchen Doris - a German employee at Rosario's restaurant Diego - young man, who is in Germany for business, who knows Rosario and asks him whether he and Diego can stay at his hotel for a few days Edoardo- Diego's partner from Naples who is along on the business trip to Germany and who begins to wonder about Rosario and Diego's past Themes:The film is an examination of 1) what a "a quiet life" really means and what is needed to conduct one 2) the relationship between Mafia Family and Blood and the sacrifices invariably made when these two things clash 3) the implications of being a mafioso and whether one can ever truly leave the Mafia What do we learn about Rosario, Diego and Edoardo in the first third of the film (up to the dog kennel scene) that is significant? We learn that Diego is Rosario's son and that now Diego and Edoardo are now involved with some sort of criminal activity 2) What is important about the scene at the dog kennel (37:56) and how does the director visually convey what is happening in the plot? How are Rosario, Diego and Renate/Mathias positioned in this scene and how does this reflect their moods and respective goals? Do any of these change during the scene? Renate and Mathias are focused on their dog whereas Rosario seems to be more focused on his other son Diego When Diego realizes that he has to go to complete something, Rosario seems to know that it has to do with mafia activities and goes to see what his son is involved in 3) Describe what happens to Rosario in the film from 1:05:24 - 1:08:50 and why it's important What film techniques does the film use to show us his emotions? How is this scene similar to the dog kennel scene? Eduardo comes to Rosario and is quiet and informs him that he knows who he really is Rosario insists that Antonio is dead but then keeps quiet and allows Eduardo to speak; he then agrees to whatever Eduardo wants but knows that either way there is most likely trouble coming 4) What does Rosario tell Diego is required to live a "quiet life", according to Rosario and what did you think of it? He essentially wants Diego to stay put and not draw attention to himself Rosario himself did not follow this exactly It seems as if you are not allowed to go anywhere it is not a life worth living 5) Describe what happens in the last ten minutes of the film (1:30-1:40) What did you think of the film's ending and the film overall? Diego is killed and Rosario escapes He picks his son Mathias and brings him back home to his mother Rosario takes a second and debates what he wants to do but then he rushes off to Hamburg where he had wanted Diego to set up his "Quiet Life" The end of the film emphasizes that you cannot escape the mafia and no matter where you go or how in the clear you are, you will always be running

Women and the Mafia - Historical Roles and Changing Relationship

Florence Newspaper publishes this really interesting essay written by Blair Wold - who has studied History of the Italian Mafia with Prof Lorenzo Picchi at the Lorenzo De' Medici Institute in the spring of 2006 - on the role of women in the mafia and other criminal organizations in the South of Italy The essay approaches the role of women in the mafia from a psychological perspective, focusing on the reasons women decide to join the mafia

The Camorra and Popular Culture

Among Italian regional cultures, Neapolitan culture, which is generally associated with the region of Campania, undoubtedly remains among the most popular and recognizable within Italy and beyond its national borders From the origins of Neapolitan music, the songs have had two parallel courses, a popular one linked to the daily life of the people that lived in the city's alleys and slums and a refined one influenced by chamber and operatic music As Ravveduto aptly underlines, one of the peculiarities of classic Neapolitan music is precisely that it combines the bourgeois musical taste of the beginning of the century with themes and emotional dispositions prevailing among the Neapolitan subaltern classes It is this peculiar condition that facilitated the development of the new hybrid musical genre, animated by recurring musical and literary topoi, which soon became well recognized in the entire world Although it goes beyond my scope to reconstruct in detail the different phases and modalities of the evolution of Neapolitan music, I want to underscore that the popular element characterizing Neapolitan song since its origins has been interpreted and inflected in various ways, highlighting diversified spirits of the polyhedric Neapolitan culture The protagonist portrays a hero affected by many troubles that are linked to his belonging to society's more unfortunate classes The sceneggiata certainly has not been the only cultural and musical genre able to interpret this popular sentiment, diffused among low-income people who live in a system parallel to that of the Italian state's legality The sceneggiata and neo-melodic music are probably the most impressive examples of this sort of acceptance of camorra values through successful, diffused forms of popular culture Although the songwriters of Neapolitan Power have viewed the camorra with a certain aloofness, denouncing and keeping a distance from such diffused immorality, for which the Italian state is generically deemed the most responsible, a more explicit engagement characterizes the new wave of musicians who became well known on the regional scene at the beginning of the new millennium In the cartography of conflicting strains that respectively glorify and condemn the camorra, the innovative rap operates as a force of musical and moral renewal in Neapolitan popular culture, augmented by Roberto Saviano's non-fiction novel Gomorrah (2006) and its multiple remediations, which constitute the medial flow and the frame in which Rocco Hunt's case must be located The innovative form of characterization crafted in Gomorra The case of "Nu Juorn Buon" has to be interpreted in relation to the two elements highlighted thus far Second, the diffusion of new medial forms and formats, ranging from Saviano's (2008) novel to the viral videos of The Jackal, constitutes a significant element in these cultural dynamics, and the web appears to be the place where this dialectic will play out in the future

#NuJuornBuon: A Viral Song

In January 2011, Rocco Hunt, who at the time was only seventeen years old, recorded his first album, entitled Spiraglio di Periferia (A glimpse of the periphery), for a web label The main themes of Rocco Hunt's songs are relatively consistent, focusing on the difficulties afflicting his land, but also the desire and the determination to obtain a sort of redemption Since his debut, just like other young people his age, Rocco Hunt has always heavily used the web, especially social networks such as Facebook and Instagram, to spread his songs, and moreover, to share fragments of his everyday life Key to examining how viral phenomena operate is the term "participatory culture," which is used to denote the totality of practices and procedures that can be activated within the so-called Web 2.0 The peculiarity of Web 2.0 is the creation of an interrupted medial flow, continuously updated and updatable, which is fed by the contributions of single users While the concept of convergence indicates the interaction between old and new media, the concept of remediation, instead, denotes the process of media redefinition Remediation answers a double logic (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 5), that is the complementarity between immediacy and hypermediacy: the highest form of immediacy depends on the highest degree of hypermediacy Although the double logic of remediation, as sustained by Bolter and Grusin (2000), does not concern only the so-called new media, and does not appear to be a phenomenon typifying our era, it can be considered the pivotal element of one of today's most used social networks, which is Instagram The diffusion of "Nu Juorn Buon" on the web has closely followed this double logic of remediation Although the concepts of convergence and remediation help us to understand the modalities of creation and production of medial contents within the Web 2.0, as in the case of "Nu Juorn Buon," they are not sufficient to comprehend the viral feature of that content, that is to say their capacity for diffusion.In addition to the specific affect produced by the medial content, it is possible to trace a positive affectivity intrinsic to participation itself Grusin (2010) writes: Leaving multiple traces of yourself on socially networked media sites is seen as a necessary goal - and interacting with such sites is made pleasurable or desirable in part because they work to produce and maintain positive affective relations with their users, to set up affective feedback loops that make one want to proliferate one's media transactions The ludic dimension of online participation sheds light on the desire to take part in the different forms of social interaction enabled by digital technologies and the pleasures thus derived The ludic dimension of social networks is inscribed primarily in the proceduralization of the typical activities related to human relations that in the offline sphere are conducted through discursive processes, which can be relatively long or articulated: becoming friends, exchanging opinions, showing feelings and states of mind, sharing situations and circumstances The game of sharing activated by "Nu Juorn Buon" indissolubly follows both of these criteria And how might we think about this form of participation within the online sphere in relation to the engaged fight against the mafia, while also avoiding the risk of mistaking mere divertissement offered by the web for socially committed action?

How does she feel about what is happening in her city and what is her opinion of some of the women who had "attained so much" in Palermo?

She had been in one of these dream homes one afternoon, to play cards An acquaintance of hers had taken her She was ready to bestow full honours upon the lady of the house, for having attained so much Instead, she found a nitwit before her eyes Parquet floor, rugs, cork panelling on the walls, a lot of ceramic pottery scattered here and there, the terrace full of plants, of scents, the maid a woman of colour who fit perfectly in the stage design A dream The entire time she was there she closely studied the gestures and words of the women around her, trying to guess the secret of that success It seemed a mystery They did not come from rich families, one can tell these things right away, before a woman even opens her mouth As for initiative, they did not even have enough to discard the right card With all this, they were rich and she was not There is no justice It is really true

fields of study under the topic of women and the mafia

They are relevant to understanding the secrets of the mafia as they exemplify a new and emerging aspect of Italy's most well know criminal organization However, it is difficult to learn and understand the true extent of women's roles within the mafia because of a rule that defines the mafia and allows it to continue This rule is omerta, a "code of silence" which dictates a Mafioso's life This rule is the law of the Mafia which forbids its members to discuss its actions, ideas or goals to anyone outside of the mafia While women may not take part in Mafia initiation processes or rituals, they are still aware of omerta and its importance One reason is because the individuals involved, "their silence guarantees its [Mafia's] survival", as well as two, the silence of the women and the official members, guarantees their personal survival and the safety of their families Therefore, it is next to impossible to fully learn the extent of women's involvement and their exact status and roles within the Italian Mafia

why does pressure get put on mafia women

This number will continue to rise as "the more men they jail, the greater the pressure on the mafia's women to fill the vacuum" This pressure leads to women acting in two ways One is that women assume themselves into the roles of the mafia men who have left their positions, either because they are in jail, or because they were killed This was the case in the mid nineties within the Naples based Camorra Mafia, where many women have moved their way up the status levels

Remediating Memory, Witnessing, and Popular Culture

We are history and for Libera Terra even more so, history is a search for truth, not a simple celebration of the past but a look toward the future, strong in the knowledge of what has been, because when memory is alive, shared, and recognized it breaks away from anonymity and becomes history Faces, names, stories, passions. To honor the people who have died means building different conditions for the societies of tomorrow, to pass on the witness through memory and thereby free societies of the criminal lien The ubiquitous acts of online witnessing in everyday living, whose artefacts range from photographs picturing quotidian minutiae to videos capturing in real time horrific events that come to mark the national imaginary, have generated substantial discussion, raising questions about testimony, memory, the relations between personal and collective histories, ethics, and an individual's Right to Be Forgotten The dispersed, heterogeneous sites featuring visual, verbal, and acoustic evidence that testify to the people and vicissitudes making up antimafia history invent the conditions for knowledge, memory, mourning, and bearing witness Among the diverse modes of witnessing, testimonial videos have become a particularly important genre in participatory antimafia culture The spatial and temporal dynamics produced through the selection of visual and verbal evidence, the forms of refabrication and staging of remediating acts of witnessing facilitate spectators' responses to implicit calls for judgment and justice The inventive web-based manners of bearing the responsibility for antimafia testimonies and the reformation of civil life in its various dimensions reconceive notions of citizenship, rights, duties, and justice, which indicate the serious threats that the Right to Be Forgotten poses to the cultural productions of legality Writing against the dominant tendency to privilege the value of memory, such authors as Hoskins and Norberto Nuno Gomes de Andrade endeavour to elucidate the key roles forgetting plays in the formation of individual and national identities, and suggest the Right to Be Forgotten also protects the right to fashion new identities and new beginnings To varying degrees, each of the situated mediations of antimafia cultural products of legality featured in this volume offers particular insights on antimafia and mafia sign warfare conducted in the contested virtual domains of popular culture, a term that warrants rethinking in view of the blurred boundaries between producers and consumers, as well as the biomediatic, or hybridized, geographies many individuals in Italy and beyond now live As diverse scholars note, the mafia mystique has substantial purchase on the Italian popular imagination, strengthened in part by representations portraying mafia men as powerful, successful, respected, seductive, and most of all, enigmatic The diversified features of the expanding antimafia imaginary enable speculations about the fantasies, desires, and kinds of affect elicited in the interplay between traditional media and Internet-based operations that mediate and remediate cultural products of legality as tools for combatting the mafia The kinds of affect invoked by medial content in general and antimafia ones in particular merit considerable critical attention for the ways they may solicit Internet browsers, cause them to linger and reflect, or motivate creative forms of interaction Such senses of pleasure, in terms of sensorial experiences, emotions, and meanings, clearly engage consumer-producers in diversified acts of remediating various cultural works of legality Her study can serve as a model for thinking about remediation as a way to improve upon earlier media forms through the active participation of user-consumers engaged in cultural practices of legality, as well as convergence culture

The Contested Spaces of History, Future Memory, and Civil Society in the Making

What is the meaning of transmitting the memory and history of the battle against the mafia? Memory is entrusting the recollection in order to perpetuate it, because the recollection is essential and necessary to being able to build the future But memory is actually a way of elaborating what happened I believe that the knowledge of the past elaborated in the present may truly provide the tools to create a future that is different from what we have lived The performative antimafia topographies of such online sites and networks as Città Nuove, Libera, Addiopizzo, Casamemoria Vittimemafia, and Rete 100 Passi (which defines itself as a participatory multimedia network), exhibit a provocative array of distinct features constituting their identities, forms of affiliation, and arts of inventing a culture of legality in daily life Situated in this lineage, the professional and citizen journalists, sites, and modalities of producing knowledge about antimafia and mafia forces also form an important field of investigation for understanding how media users-consumers participate in the creation of cultural spatialities of legality Viewing the hyperabundant information that continues to expand the dimensions and navigational possibilities of cyberspace may reasonably lead one to assume there is a corresponding excess in acts of speaking about the Italian mafias Serving as dispersed outposts of legality amidst Facebosses, videos, postings, blogs and fan communities idolizing the mafiosi, web-based antimafia newspapers, magazines, and television broadcasts have proliferated since the late 1990s, and fashion new sites and modes for exercising the right to speak, perform in-depth inquiries into the mafia and political corruption, and remediate antimafia history A particularly significant component constituting the cyberspatial relations and functions taking place in online antimafia news sites is the cultivation of visitor participation, which serves to create knowledge communities akin to those conceptualized by Pierre Levy (1997) and to mobilize citizens in diverse ways The varied forms and modes of online media designed to produce and disseminate factual information about both the mafia organizations and antimafia culture of legality function as strategies of deterritorialization that foster different kinds of knowledge spaces Antimafia journalism places fundamental importance on disseminating information about how the mafias operate, mobilizing citizens, and remediating contemporary Italian culture of daily living and society, in the sense of reforming it through the values and practices of civil rights and responsibilities, participatory democracy, and social volunteerism In fact, though the antimafia social networks exhibit distinct home pages, interior architecture, and links, a largely stable feature is a section devoted to volunteer projects, which situate the taking place of civil culture in public piazzas, streets, parks, and often schools

Imperfect Erasures

What traces of resistance are lost or compromised given the press of communicative capitalism? In her critical reading of the figure of Peppino Impastato in the film I cento passi, Renga (2013) argues that the "antimafia message" is oversimplified, depoliticized, and desexualized The analysis presented by Renga offers a way to think about a vertical reading of the representation of Cento passi wine on Libera Terra's Facebook site, particularly when read against the diary entries written by Peppino before he was murdered The erasure of Peppino's homosexuality from the memorial landscape on Libera Terra's Facebook site raises questions about the extent to which heterosexualization occupies a "civilizing" nexus in the antimafia imaginary more generally and within the context of Libera Terra more specifically The stories of resistance that collect around the figure of Cento passi wine consistently refer to "a distance to cover" (referring to the 100 steps between Impastato's home in Cinisi and the home of mafioso Gaetano Badalamenti, a symbol of the close distance between justice and mafia corruption) and "a land to be redeemed A vertical reading of Cento passi wine illuminates imperfect erasures of an antimafia history that is anxious about homosexuality and a feminine non-violent ethos While Libera Terra's public pedagogy creates a political sphere of communication that has emancipatory potential for cultural and social renewal, particularly within the context of a society in transition, it simultaneously remains uncritically identified with a heteronormativity that undermines fully inclusive conditions of belonging The view I advocate is one that more fully politicizes the partial and/or lost memories of queer, gay, and feminist antimafia protest through memory work and political deliberation that sustains a critical relationship with existing norms for civility and justice

AMELIA CRISANTINO (1956 -)

one of the leading scholars researching the Mafia in Sicily has written a number of important studies on the Mafia: 'The Mafia as method and system' (1989), 'Understanding the Mafia' (1994), 'About the secret, active association: A sect at the origins of the Mafia' (2000), etc. explores the many not initiated collaborators of the Mafia in Palermo of the 1980's in 'Searching for Palermo' (1990)

Using the taped Edoardo Zaffuto lecture as your primary source, discuss the phenomenon of the pizzo and the resistance to paying it in Palermo. What are the functions and importance to the Mafia of the pizzo, the obstacles faced in fighting it and how do Addiopizzo and Addiopizzo Travel help businesses and consumers to not support the Mafia?

Addiopizzo is an open, fluid and dynamic movement, that acts from below and presents itself as a spokesman of a "cultural revolution"against the mafia It is constituted by all the women and men, the girls and the boys, the shopkeepers and the customers who recognize themselves in the sentence "A whole people that pays the pizzo is a people without dignity" Addiopizzo is also an association of volunteers that is openly apolitical and purposely "mono-thematic", for which its specific field of action, in the context of a broader antimafia movement, is the promotion of a virtuous and mafia-free economy through the means of the "critical consumption Addiopizzo" OUR MISSION Mafia-free tourism, a new frontier for the ethical tourist, supports those who rebel against the Mafia dominion BEAUTY & ENGAGEMENT We offer you a land of extraordinary cultural and artistic heritage An experience which balances beauty with social duty This is an opportunity to understand, first hand, the most important moments, people and places of the Anti-Mafia movement We want to show our visitors the real face of Sicily, above and beyond stereotypes and tourist traps We want to restore dignity to our country and raise the profile of the people who are fighting for change We want our guests to be captivated by this experience so that they may have the same enthusiasm as us OUR PIZZO-FREE POLICY The businesses which we use for our tours do not pay pizzo (this is the Italian name for protection money, a sort of "extorted tax" imposed by the Mob) They are owners of hotels, B&Bs, restaurants, farms and transport agencies who have made the brave decision to rebel against the Mafia Some of them work in premises confiscated from bosses of Cosa Nostra Whoever travels with us chooses accommodation facilities certified by Addiopizzo and travels 100% pizzo-free Take a stand and aid the development of circulating a clean economy Take a stand and support the volunteers working on the front line of this social conflict Take a stand and help us stop the Mafia receiving a single cent of your money DONATIONS A part of the revenue of Addiopizzo Travel is donated to local NGO which plays an active role in our tours: Comitato Addiopizzo, Casa Memoria Peppino e Felicia Impastato a Cinisi, Libera, Centro Sociale San Francesco Saverio, Centro Siciliano di Documentazione "Giuseppe Impastato" In particular, the funds we donate to Addiopizzo is used for publicize the communication campaing against the Mafia, strenghten the mafia-free shops and business network and contribute to the social, cultural and recreational activities with children and teenagers in the poorest areas of Palermo WHERE DO WE COME FROM: THE GRASSROOTS MOVEMENT 'ADDIOPIZZO' Our tour operator emerged from Addiopizzo as an extension of the ethical consumer strategy against the pizzo it specifically targets the tourism sector This grassroots Anti-Mafia movement was founded in 2004 by a group of young people under one slogan: an entire people which pays pizzo is a people without dignity The strategy used by Addiopizzo in its work is wholly innovative: ethical consumerism against the pizzo People's selective purchases support businesses which do not give in to the extortionate demands of the Mafia and openly side against them Addiopizzo urges society to commit to change and encourages a collective cultural revolution against the Mafia

marriage and family in the mafia

Although marriage is essential to the creation of close relationships between men of honour, marriage also tends to lead to producing a family Though Italy may be a masculine country, women gain important status when they bear children, especially in the mafia "For Mafiosi the mother patently embodies a strong symbolic value", and this value is shown when she is considered "useful, [as] she has a function as the mother of male children" Despite this severe and blatant sexism, this is what is expected of Italian Mafiosi wives While the wives may live lavishly and have social prestige, the "principal role of a Mafia wife/ mother is to raise her children according to Mafia principles, ensuring that the two worlds of Mafia and family become indistinguishable" This 'function' of having children does not stop after their birth because the children will become the future Mafiosi, so "continuity is crucial because children are the future of the organization" This relates back to the mothers and their job of teaching their children, as they need to be taught the values and lessons which are integrated into the mafia structure As mafia wives and mothers accept their way of life and their husbands 'work' as normalities, these women are perpetuating the mafia 'values', goals and views, by teaching and installing them into their children As a result, the business of violence, intimidation and corruption is continued

A Brief History of Libera Terra and the Project of Transitional Justice

In 2012, during a series of interviews with antimafia activists and educators working in Palermo, I asked if they believed that Italy was indeed a society in transition as it recovers from the economic, emotional, and environmental devastation created by the mafia Libera Terra was, in large part, made possible by the Rognoni-La Torre legislation The 1996 Rognoni-La Torre legislation provides for the use of goods and estates confiscated from the mafia for the social good In the last fifteen years, particularly in the south of Italy, a number of social entrepreneurial projects have emerged that generate employment and increase social, cultural, and economic stability In fact, in their study of the implementation of the Rognoni-La Torre Law, Picciotto and her colleagues (2015) found that communities value this law, not solely for taking resources away from the mafia, but for generating economic and social renewal

I was the first to lose my freedom': How police protection impacts Italy's investigative reporters

Explaining the sudden presence of two grim-looking bodyguards in a way that wouldn't scare her children was never going to be easy for Federica Angeli, a reporter for la Repubblica "I told them that mom wrote an article that was so excellent the newspaper gave her two drivers and a car," she recalled Six years on, Angeli and her children have round-the-clock police protection because of threats to her from the mafia in Rome and in her hometown, Ostia The journalist is escorted in an armored car to and from her newspaper every day, she cannot walk alone or easily pick up her children from school "The strange thing is that I was the first to lose my freedom, well before those I had investigated in my articles were imprisoned Angeli is one of around 20 reporters in Italy who are defended by armed police 24/7 due to credible threats, in addition to over 165 journalists who have some form of police protection, according to a 2018 December report by Ossigeno, an Italian nongovernmental organization that tracks threats and attacks on journalists While in Italy last month, I spoke with five journalists who described what it was like to work under la Scorta, the country's system of police protection As Angeli noted bitterly, "It is efficient on an operative level, but it is also a way for the mafia to kill proper reporting on their wrongdoings, by preventing journalists to be able to do their work Some of the journalists added that they viewed comments by Matteo Salvini, Italy's powerful far-right leader and former deputy prime minister who earlier this year suggested cutting the safety measures, as dangerous rhetoric at a time when the press is under threat A report by the Council of Europe's Platform for the Protection of Journalism and Safety of Journalists, that CPJ is a partner of, noted that the number of press freedom violations reported to the platform more than tripled in Italy in 2018 compared to 2017 "The growing violence against journalists in Italy is particularly worrying," the report said

When a Journalist Defies More Than the Mafia: The Legacy of Giuseppe Fava and Italian Antimafia Culture

Giuseppe Fava, a newspaper editor, author and playwright who was regarded as one of Italy's most outspoken campaigners against organized crime, has been slain, the police said today Only last week he appeared on a nationally televised talk show to discuss the Mafia

Who is Mariannina (pg. 110-111) and what does she represent to Ida?

Ida Benelli gave a start as she read the headline that the L'Ora newspaper ran on the first page She knew that name She went up to the newsstand and looked at the photograph She recognized Mariannina standing among her crying relatives next to the male murder victim She bought the newspaper 'Mariannina's brother is dead Who would ever have thought that he was mixed up in these things,' she thought 'Who knows if they were able to make some money That's clearly why someone gets mixed up in such matters Then they wind up killing him Maybe they killed him just because he was the friend of some other guy A really senseless death In any case, his friends would take care of avenging him At least one hopes so And what about the widow? In the movies they always help her Perhaps I ought to renew my ties with Marian-nina again

Facebook and the "Taste of Justice"

In 2008, one year after forming Libera Informazione, Libera Terra opened a Facebook account featuring a photograph of the Pietra Longa Vineyard in Monreale taken at dawn in May A cursory scan of the types of entries made on Facebook, the comments as well as the number of "likes," suggests that members of Libera Terra use social networking to engage in the kind of "low-risk" political involvement criticized by Morozov (2009) and Dean A closer analysis, however, suggests a more complicated set of engagements with projects of agricultural renewal that includes an ethical orientation to both virtual and offline ethical action, as well as to cultivating memories of non-violent antimafia protest This subtle but powerful act of posting and "liking" the vineyards on Portella della Ginestra generates resonances among the past and the present and hopes for the future, culminating in what Jacqui Alexander (2005) describes as a palimpsestic method for reading and writing In her book Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (2005), Alexander uses the image of the palimpsest to illustrate a method of analysis that examines how discourse moves historically, economically, and ideologically, both horizontally (meaning across borders of nation, gender, sexuality, and race) and vertically (meaning that each figure, such as an agricultural cooperative or an antimafia leader, accumulates historically gendered, raced, and sexualized meaning) The following questions guide the penultimate section of this inquiry: What memory work is taken up and sustained through a social networking project that both promotes justice but also exemplifies communicative capitalism? What memories are generated, lost, or sustained through the work of don Ciotti and the agrarian history of dissent he teaches through a project that frames food and wine as instruments of liberation? What lost traces of resistance are restored to public memory and to what extent are these traces compromised by communicative capitalism's proclivity to depoliticize?

#NuJuornBuon: Aesthetics of Viral Antimafia

In February 2014, the twenty-year-old rapper Rocco Pagliarulo, aka Rocco Hunt, won the "New Talents" award at the 64th edition of the Festival della canzone italiana di Sanremo, the most popular competition of Italian pop music In the following study I analyse the song "Nu Juorn Buon" as a significant case in which the diffusion of an antimafia message is made possible by the utilization of practices and procedures rendered available by digital technologies, and in particular, by social networks My analysis works through the methodological approach provided by the field of aesthetics, drawing upon Emilio Garroni's (1986) theory of sense in its multiple signification of sense, sensation, and meaning, and investigating the conditions of possibility of experience in general At the outset of my discussion, I examine the complex cultural and medial environment in which to situate the case of "Nu Juorn Buon." The examination ultimately aims to illustrate the necessity of a techno-aesthetics education, which I propose as a means for transforming online participation into effective antimafia practice

Casamemoria Vittimemafia as Countermonument

In the 1990s, German artists attempting to commemorate the Holocaust made use of what has been called the countermonument, constructed to offer an alternative to the static nature and promise of closure and reconciliation inherent to traditional monuments Tamir Sorek (2015), drawing on the Popular Memory Group, has aptly summarized the tensions inherent in the struggle among groups to stake their claim to the "contested terrain" of memory work This terrain is occupied by many actors with various agendas and diverse narratives who compete over the construction of the past Elsewhere, I have used the term "unresolved commemorations" to refer to instances in which dominant and marginalized groups collaborate but maintain their conflicting positions with regard to commemoration

What do you think of Ida Benelli?

Sitting in an armchair, her feet resting on a small table set in front of her, with a cucumber hydra-toner mask on her face, Ida Benelli was flipping through a magazine in the kitchen of her home Her hair was wrapped in a white towel, her face covered with a thick layer of light green gel that gave her a sensation of well-being Her eyes still closed, Ida Benelli stretched in the chair and smiled at herself while she thought, 'It would really be exciting Not exposing yourself, not revealing who you are It's happened so many times that a blackmailer has been killed She instantly remembered the scenes from countless American movies Blackmailers killed with guns, poisons, knives, tampered brakes and down over the mountainside No pity for them, there's always someone who says, 'Die, dirty blackmailer Badly shaven guys or women with caked-on make-up You dislike them immediately Ida Benelli smiled at the thought of that scene, so much naivety was even touching Nothing to do about it, too many risks The shame of that sort of story could fall on the whole family Ida Benelli gave a start as she read the headline that the L'Ora newspaper ran on the first page Ida Benelli had a very quick mind and was practical by nature, two things that had always come in useful

Democratizing the Memorial Landscape: Casamemoria Vittimemafia's Calendar of Loss

On 10 April 2015, the Facebook page Casamemoria Vittimemafia updated its status to read: "10 April 1998 Catania Annalisa's father had been killed five years earlier in an ambush by a rival clan in Acireale In the La Stampa article, journalist Fabio Albanese makes the following editorial statement about Annalisa: It seems that the uncle punished her in this way for a life that was a little too rowdy, for her dangerous associations with people from other clans; young people whom Annalisa met because they were the same age and were part of the same social circles, certainly not because they were mafiosi

Enfranchising Grief

Perhaps one of the most important aspects of virtual commemoration has to do with "enfranchising grief that has not been socially sanctioned" and expanding "boundaries of who is allowed or expected to participate in the mourning process" As a way to address the limited grievability afforded everyday citizens with whose stories other everyday citizens might identify, Casamemoria Vittimemafia asks that symbolic entrepreneurs "engage in mobilizing activities similar to those undertaken by social movement activists Jack Santino (2006) uses the term "performative commemoratives" to describe sites and rituals that "commemorate a loss but which also draw attention to the social conditions that contributed to the loss" Electronic memorials also offer the possibility of positioning the personal and affective - blogs, personal web pages, photographs taken by sit-in participants - alongside the documents of a dominant culture - mainstream newspaper articles, television interviews with figures like Falcone and Borsellino - while also allowing for constant modification and expansion The contributors to Casamemoria Vittimemafia seek out forgotten stories and post them among stories of more well-known cases, elevating the unknowns to the importance of the famous

A House of the Dead in Cyberspace

The Facebook group "Una casa della memoria per le vittime della mafia" (founded in 2009), its affiliated Facebook Community page (Casamemoria Vittimemafia), and affiliated blog at Vittimemafia.it (created in 2011) use the words of author and antimafia activist Aldo Penna to describe their mission: "We give voice to silence.In terms of the project's mission, there is a strong emphasis on "making memory" (fare memoria), which, like the idea of a "place" itself, has something of a concreteness about it but also demonstrates an awareness of the need to mould memory as opposed to preserving it Making memory is an obligation, a duty that we feel we owe to all those who have been killed at the hands of mafias, an obligation to the victims' families, to all of society, but, first and foremost, to our consciences as citizens, as lay people and Christians, as men and women who live their lives without resignation The idea that these online projects work to turn the ephemeral into the concrete ("We cannot limit ourselves to remembering, even though it is our duty to not forget The project itself, as mentioned above, encompasses three specific sites on the web The second component of the project is a Facebook group entitled "Una casa della memoria per le vittime della mafia" with 3,682 members as of 10 April 2015 The third and final component of the project is the Vittime Mafia blog, which is not a Facebook page (although the opportunity to share articles to one's own Facebook profile is provided, as are links to the organization's Facebook page and group) This page houses a "Scheda" (data sheet) which lists articles/obituaries in chronological order for as many victims of mafia assassinations as the group has documented so far, beginning with 3 March 1861 and up to 31 December 2014 In the following sections I will look at this three-pronged project, focusing particularly on the Casamemoria Vittimemafia Facebook Community page, from a number of critical perspectives on collective, cultural and popular memory, countermonuments, and web memorials in order to comment on how the project responds to the needs of the community and what the project's contribution to the culture of the antimafia might be

The Figures of the Placido Rizzotto Cooperative and Cento Passi Wine

The Placido Rizzotto cooperative operates in the upper Belice Corleonese Region of Sicily and produces Cento passi wine The posts on Libera Terra's Facebook site that reference Cooperativo Placido Rizzotto and Cento passi wine continually return to the language of, for instance, progress and advancement (sviluppo), transformation (trasformazione), and redemption (riscatto), as illustrated by various posts: "... è stata trasformata in agroturismo ed assegnata alla cooperativa sociale Pio la Torre - Libera Terra" (... it was transformed into agritourism and assigned to the social cooperative Pio La Torre - Libera Terra); "adesso rappresenta il riscatto dello Stato e dei cittadini e l'affermazione dei valori di legalità e sviluppo" (now it represents the redemption of the state and citizens and the affirmation of the values of legality and development, 4 December 2009) If, as Dean (2005) argues, "governance by the people is thought in terms of communicative freedoms of speech, assembly, and the press, norms of publicity that emphasize transparency, and accountability, and the deliberative practices of the public sphere," the communicative practices used by Libera Terra, specifically when posting, "liking," and visually representing the social cooperative Placido Rizzotto and Vino Cento Passi, indeed impact official politics Drawing on Hannah Arendt's concept of political judgment, Leebaw (2011) calls for a form of public pedagogy that learns from stories of those who resist systematic atrocities in an effort to evaluate the problem of complicity in the past and to establish new forms of solidarity, agency, and community in the future This work continues, not in a "post-traumatic" state, as Renga has argued in her study of Italian mafia cinema, but, given the persistent impact the mafia has on national and international economies, in the very midst of social breakdown

For the mafia to be a male-only society how is it possible for women to become involved?

The answer is neither simple nor precise Historically and still today, women are not considered part of the mafia, for as Dickie points out, "women cannot formally be admitted to the mafia and honour [one of its defining values] is exclusively a male quality" As such, women's main connection to the mafia has been and continues to be, through marriage and birth, although the mafia as a "secret organization [has] the rule that its members must not tell their blood family members anything about its affairs" Regardless of these facts it is women that "have an important strategic function in that the linking of two Mafia clans through marriage can consolidate or mend relations between them..." This strategy of marriage is vital to establishing alliances within the structures of a criminal organization, and opposing families

Calendarization and Control

The calendar-based format of Casamemoria Vittimemafia's Internet presence, enhanced by Facebook's date-centric structure, seems to highlight a tension between traditional and postmodern forms of commemoration If Nora (1989) argues that self-consciously created calendars are an essential element of national identity, others have broadened the concept to include discussions of what it means to create alternative calendars While the emphasis on the calendar structure and the anniversaries of victims' deaths work to simultaneously modify the religious practice of assigning saints days, include figures who clearly do not conform to the definition of saints, and interrogate the need for saints in the first place, it also provides another avenue of resistance Renate Siebert (1996) has documented the way in which the vendetta becomes a commemorative ritual carried out on symbolic dates and anniversaries: The vendetta was a commemoration of death; for instance, feuds in Calabria are tied to dates and anniversaries, a strategy of memory which reconnects the vendetta with the trauma suffered For just one example of this practice, we can remember the murder of beloved antimafia activist and priest don Giuseppe Diana, assassinated as he prepared for mass on 19 March 1994 Siebert (1996) also connects this method of the vendetta to folk forms of feuding and mourning, and notes that "by formally imitating an ancient ritual, emptied of its meaning of reciprocity and reparation, the mafia implies a claim on popular roots and affiliations, while at the same time pursuing its own aim of intimidation and domination which has nothing to do with the balance of traditional community" I believe that it is precisely a connection to traditional forms of mourning, despite the fact that they are both reinvented in a secular form and practised in cyberspace, that makes Casamemoria Vittimemafia's project very powerful for those who choose to engage with it

mafiosi children

The involvement of women in the mafia does not end at strategical marriages and raising Mafiosi children It has expanded considerably to include violence (though rare), involvement in drug operations, money laundering and other illicit operations Not only has women's involvement grown in terms of the areas they are part of, but "their participation ... in illicit activities has undoubtedly increased..." so much that while in 1990 there was only one mafia case involving women but in 1995 there were 89 cases

Is Ida fit to be a mafiosa - why or why not?

The magazine had articles on current news, fashion, and culture for the up-to-date, dynamic woman, so it also alluded to the less desirable aspect of the city Parquet floor, rugs, cork panelling on the walls, a lot of ceramic pottery scattered here and there, the terrace full of plants, of scents, the maid a woman of colour who fit perfectly in the stage design They did not come from rich families, one can tell these things right away, before a woman even opens her mouth She leaned against the wall, stopping to read, something a respectable woman should never do

For a Techno-aesthetic Education of Viral Antimafia

The pervasiveness of online practices and the diffusion of mobile technologies has eroded the distinction between "reality" and virtuality that marked the dawning of the contemporary digital era The emotional response of social networks on the configuration of offline spaces and the practices performed in these spaces has not been seen as a secondary outcome Thus thinking of mediality in terms of affect is to think of our media practices not only in terms of their structures of signification or symbolic representation but more crucially in terms of the ways in which media function on the one hand to discipline, control, contain, manage, or govern human affectivity and its affiliated things "from above," at the same time that they work to enable particular forms of human action, particular collective expressions or formations of human affect "from below." The distinguishing feature of "Nu Juorn Buon" is how it attaches the antimafia message to a positive affect, linked to feelings of hope, optimism, and trust in the future, which are amplified by the authenticity and sunny disposition of Rocco Hunt's persona However, as clearly illustrated by Rocco Hunt's case, it is the very standardized and mainly ludic procedures that produce new medial forms, such as hashtag and viral video, that are able to determine the affective horizon in which new generations are formed The act of technical externalization of our sensibility, today amplified by digital technologies, requires the development of skills and expertise that would enable direct, creative, and critical intervention on devices and softwares, fostering the possibility to activate a virtuous relation between technologies, the world, and our aesthetic faculties The concept of a techno-aesthetic education and practices opens possibilities that go beyond the hope that online participation can be translated into physical activism in territories ruled by the camorra and other mafia organizations, thus achieving what some propose is a more concrete effectiveness Rather, in the context of this study, such operativity constitutes the instrument for constructing new interconnected environs, new public spaces, and new communities for performative cultural products of legality

characteristics of women in the mafia

These assumptions are proven wrong, as is being continually discovered that these characteristics are only a façade Italian women are taking over their dead male relatives' roles within the mafia and seeking revenge for their murders or carrying out new orders on their behalf This is in addition to the women who are not only marrying into mafia families, but raising children to continue the existence of the criminal organization by teaching their children the values and the ideas of the mafia This will only serve to perpetuate the cycles of violence and pursuit of power that is the basis of the mafia Women, once depicted as weak and submissive, are now entering, obeying orders and making decisions for one of the most dangerous criminal organizations in the world- the Italian Mafia

The second way in which women are pressured to 'fill the vacuum' left from Mafiosi

is for the "mothers, wives, and daughters [to carry] out minor tasks" One of the many ways this can be accomplished is by women using "their maiden names to open 'clean' bank accounts and start businesses" Besides performing tasks for the mafia, women also play a role by being 'extra' supportive This can be recognized in the recent arrest of Bernardo Provenzano, the current boss of the Cosa Nostra He had been living in hiding for several decades, and was not able to physically meet with his wife However, they were still able to communicate with one another through pizzini, secret messages As he would regularly request fresh coffee and food and clean laundry, and his wife, Saveria Palazzollo, would comply, it was one day when he stuck his hand out the door of his shack to receive a package of laundry, that the police moved in and arrested him (Harnden) While this type of involvement is still contributing to the success of the mafia, the "strongest, most powerful Mafia women are widows who have taken over their husbands' territory following their deaths"

Carmela Palazzo

known as Cerasella, took over the reins of her brother's drug operations while he was in prison Her control of Naples' trade in speedballs (a mixture of heroine and cocaine) made her the head of the Palazzo family

Questions of Participation and Engagement

While folk forms of feuding and mourning are performed within a physical community and require various levels of participation from community members, whether they choose to become involved or not, membership in online communities tends to be elective, occasional, and not always quantifiable But still, Casamemoria Vittimemafia's numbers are modest compared to the most popular antimafia-themed Facebook pages On the other hand, a 30 March 2015 status update by Casamemoria Vittimemafia remembering Daniele Polimeni, a nineteen-year-old boy whose corpse was discovered on 30 March 2005, received five "likes" and four "shares "Daniele Polimeni was nineteen years old, a rowdy young man But Daniele did not have the opportunity to make a different choice Daniele was an aspiring mafioso but his death is lamented because he had no other choice What's more, while page "likes" and web traffic is clearly important to any group that wants to communicate its message, Casamemoria Vittimemafia is simultaneously occupied with fundamentally altering the content and form of antimafia memories, a project enabled to a certain extent by Facebook, but which also takes place in the non-virtual world

Two Shots and Five Bullets in Catania

With its first report on 7 January 1984, the New York Times announced the death of the internationally acclaimed journalist Giuseppe Fava Mafiosi are in the Parliament, sometimes they are ministers, sometimes they are bankers, mafiosi are those who are in charge of the nation right now The assassination of Fava was not an entirely surprising event, given his unrelenting, concise disclosures about mafia crimes in print, television broadcasts, and film However, it took more than ten years to discover the perpetrators behind the murder of Fava In the following discussion, I focus on Fava's ethical codes and explore how they constitute a legacy of socially committed journalism, which functions as both a weapon to defeat mafia organizations and culture, and contributes to the formation of antimafia writers working in online journalism today While keeping in mind the varied contributions made by journalists who published valuable investigations into the mafia and its crimes, I want to focus here on the particular ethics and works that distinguish Fava's contributions to both the field of antimafia journalism in the seventies and the eighties and, subsequently, the practices and roles of web-based antimafia journalism, as the current practitioners endeavour to change the sociopolitical and cultural landscape of the country I Siciliani giovani was formed specifically to sustain Fava's ethical principles of journalism and civil life, as incorporated in his publication I Siciliani Similarly, Libera Informazione has solid connections with I Siciliani giovani, and has organized events at which Fava's legacy is recalled to cultural memory in order to mobilize the participants around his principles of civil responsibility and the antimafia fight against all crimes, corruption, injustice, and oppression

The Italian mafia

one of the most feared criminal organizations in the world Their connections reach into all parts of life, political, social and economical, and extend to countries all over the world When people think about the mafia, women are rarely considered, except as wives or daughters Their 'role' within the mafia was historically non-existent, but that is rapidly changing Many women who are related to mafia men have seen crime as a way of life, its payoffs and the status it brings to someone whom is a man of honour It is no wonder then, that women may become interested in the mafia, its organization and its operations Even though women may be thought of as innocent, naïve, and passive, this may act only as a front and façade for their devious and criminal actions They can be equally malicious as their male-counterparts As women are not allowed to 'join' the mafia's secret society, they take it upon themselves to perpetuate its existence through alliances in marriages, through teaching Mafiosi children the values and 'laws' of the mafia, and in seeking revenge for their male relatives' murders or taking over businesses that they have left behind Regardless of their roles, women are involved with the mafia, and their statuses are going to increase within Action needs to be taken against the Italian Mafia and these mafia women in order to stop them, and work towards eradicating one of the worst criminal organizations in the today's society