If The Leopard’s relationship with Sicily is uncomfortable, then The Godfather’s, in its literary and cinematic representations, is positively dysfunctional. The story of the rise of Vito Andolini from his Sicilian origins to become Don Corleone has dripped into the collective subconscious, constantly feeding and underlining the island’s association with organised crime. Whether listening to a travelogue on Spanish radio, watching a cookery programme on English television or reading a holiday article in the popular American press, it is impossible not to pick up references to the book, published in 1969, and, more often, to Coppola’s film trilogy (released between 1972 and 1990). These lazy allusions are trotted out with little thought for the stereotypical implications and their entrenchment.
This is not to detract from the masterly craftsmanship of Francis Ford Coppola’s three films, especially the first two, but rather highlights the lasting impact of a successful franchise. Italian directors such as Francesco Rosi had already made films dealing with the complex criminal aspects of Sicilian society, notably Salvatore Giuliano (1962), but The Godfather migrated the story to America and in so doing contrasted the gap in circumstances between the two places. The American experience, by definition, lent a certain nostalgia to the island and its role in begetting the mafia, a wistfulness that compares unfavourably with the harsh and brutal origins of the modern organisation amongst the enforcers who patrolled the orange groves of Palermo’s Conca d’Oro in the nineteenth century.
All three of the films have segments set in Sicily, from Michael Corleone’s refuge on the island in the original movie and the early life of Don Vito in Part II, to the final denouement on the steps of the Teatro Massimo in Part III. Unsurprisingly, these Palermo sequences brought the cast to The Palms where Al Pacino (who played Michael Corleone) left the sketch of a glass in Toti Librizzi’s album and Coppola drew a book in honour of Mario Puzo’s novel. Ironically, Coppola saw little mileage in turning the text into film when he was first approached about the project. As Puzo has himself admitted, The Godfather was nothing more than a money-maker for its author to support his large family, and was a book that he compared unfavourably with the two previous novels he had written. Coppola had the perception that the pulp elements of Puzo’s work would clash with his art-house ethic and was thus dissuaded.
However, Coppola was in need of money due to the box office failure of previous projects. The director and his partner, George Lucas, owed huge sums to Warner Brothers. Realistically, he could not afford to turn down a potential money-spinner. Coppola was asked to work directly with Puzo on the script for the first movie which, surprisingly, resulted in a harmonious partnership. When the Italian-American community heard whisperings of the production, there were inevitable mutterings of opposition. Long tainted with the stigma of gangsterism, Americans of Italian descent were not keen to have this image reinforced. The Italian-American Civil Rights League contacted elected officials, asking them to persuade the studio heads to cancel the project. A degree of accommodation was reached when it was agreed that proceeds from the premiere would be directed towards community organisations.
If thought was given to the feelings of immigrant Italians, little heed was paid to the impact such a project would have on Sicilians, especially given that Coppola had insisted the Sicilian scenes be filmed on the island, thereby reinforcing the link already evident in the script. Although, after pressure from the aforementioned Civil Rights League, the words ‘mafia’ and ‘Cosa Nostra’ do not appear in the film, it is obvious to all that the gangster families were implicitly part of such an organisation. The critical reception of the film and its sequel went beyond expectations in America, with the movie receiving multiple Academy Awards and Golden Globes. Coppola had achieved the considerable feat of taking a genre concept and creating a multi-layered film that interwove the complexities of immigrant struggle with a brutal realisation of the American Dream — from rural poverty to corporate gangsterism.
There were dissenters, however, who saw a bleak hopelessness in the stone-faced violence, especially that meted out by Michael Corleone, Don Vito’s son, on his rise to control the organisation. Peter Cowie, in his biography of Coppola, quotes the director Nicholas Roeg, who found that Michael’s murderous brutality in pursuit of power was full of dark fatality, lacking all decency — it was a film that kept him awake at night.
In many ways, the more troublesome aspect is the idealisation of certain figures, a pseudo-glamorisation that even pleased some members of the mob who must have been concerned about their portrayal in a mass-market film. At the start of The Godfather, Vito Corleone, aka Vito Andolini, is holding court in the manner of a medieval monarch. He is being petitioned by those who seek the kind of justice that cannot be administered via the forces of law and order. Vito’s manners are courteous and civilised in direct contrast to those who, in real life, have been recorded by the police. Their speech, littered with vicious invective, is anything but the well-mannered politesse of Corleone’s latent threats.
In his book Cosa Nostra, the historian John Dickie gives his views on the clash between the fiction of cinema and the reality of organised crime. He acknowledges the veracity of certain aspects but also highlights the stylisation that leads to a warping of the truth. Dickie tells the story of the respected surgeon Dr Galati, who was the first to leave a detailed account of the mafia persecution he experienced in the 1870s. Dr Galati managed, on behalf of his family, a fruit farm that was situated on the edge of Palermo. The previous owner, his brother-in-law, had been threatened by the farm warden, Carollo, who was syphoning off profits from the sale of the citrus fruit. Galati, not wanting further trouble, decided to lease the property to a third party, only to find that such a proposal enraged Carollo, who warned him not to pursue this course of action.
The surgeon promptly sacked the presumptuous guard and hired a new man who was subsequently found with bullets in his back. Galati went to the police and hired yet another warden. The police were ineffective and Galati’s family and employees continued to be threatened. Once more, the new guard was shot, although this time he survived and reported the perpetrators to the police. Suspecting that the police inspector was in league with Carollo, and realising what he was up against, Galati fled with his family to Naples, after which the original warden, backed by powerful friends, casually applied for a permit to go hunting on the Galati family property. This event is illustrative of the nascent mafia in action — a far cry from the magnanimous mumblings of Corleone, distributing his largesse to those in his thrall. Dickie notes that the code of honour which applied in the Galati case, linked to an initiation ritual, is a far cry from that widely held in everyday circles.
Marlon Brando, who was cast in the role of Don Vito, wore a plastic mouth insert to ensure a consistent emulation of his poorly enunciated speech. The characters were spellbound in both respect and fear of the Don, and in many ways, the same could be said of the actors with regard to Marlon Brando, with whom they all wanted to perform. It took days for their awestruck timidity to subside, helped along by Brando’s comic expressions designed to put them at ease. Brando also went the extra mile for his part, as Stefan Kanfer records in his biography of the actor, by attending a dinner at the house of a renowned mafioso. He internalised the feeling of family, in both senses of the word. Al Pacino, whose grandparents actually hailed from Corleone, has also admitted to meeting mob figures to better characterise his portrayal of Don Vito’s son Michael but, understandably, has been very cagey in giving away any details. Interestingly, Mario Puzo claimed never to have met a real gangster in his life.
In the first film, released in 1972, Michael Corleone flees to Sicily, where he seeks shelter after his killing of Virgil Sollozzo and a corrupt police officer; the event triggers a full-blown mafia war. Sollozzo was seeking investment and protection for his drug-trafficking venture, a business that Vito Corleone was wary of entering for fear of upsetting his political connections. As we know from the mafia summit at The Palms, the real organisation was less chary of dealing with illicit substances. Post-war mafiosi on both sides of the Atlantic were already dipping more than their toes into the lucrative heroin market.
When on the island, Michael inevitably goes to Corleone, which was represented by the Messinese village of Forza d’Agrò, a settlement at the opposite end of Sicily. Its narrow stone-paved streets and traditional buildings were deemed to be more like Corleone than the town itself. Nearby Savoca also stood in for the infamous childhood home of Don Vito. Unlike the American critical reception of the film, the Italian press originally had a mixed reaction, particularly with regard to the elements shot in Sicily. John Dickie recalls one critic dubbing the Sicilian scenes ‘offensively stupid’. Dickie agrees with this opinion, to a certain extent, especially when he cites Michael querying the lack of men in Corleone, to which he receives the response that it was due to the ubiquity of vendetta. The historian then makes the point that typhus was the more likely killer during that time period.
The Godfather Part II followed on the successful heels of Part I in 1974, with Robert De Niro playing the younger Vito Corleone. Once again, Forza d’Agrò hosted the Sicilian segments. When Vito returns to the island for the first time after emigrating, he exacts revenge on the local mafia chieftain who had killed his family. Corleone’s arrival in Palermo was not actually shot in the city but at a small rural railway station among the foothills of Etna which caused much delay in filming due to the constant cloud cover descending from the mountain.
The Godfather Part III (1979) is the film with the closest connection to Palermo and The Palms. Michael’s son, Anthony, has become an opera tenor and is given the opportunity to debut at the Teatro Massimo. It is thanks to Coppola’s insistence on shooting in authentic locations that some of the cast and crew decamped to the island and spent time in the hotel. It takes less than ten minutes to amble from the hotel foyer to the steps of the theatre, although we imagine Pacino et al were provided with cars. Pip Whitaker’s Villa Malfitano was also featured, as were a wider plethora of Sicilian locations including Segesta, Taormina and the hilltop town of Erice — reflecting Coppola’s significantly increased budget.
The film, despite Academy Award nominations, did not reach the critical heights of its forebears. The fact that it was the third and final part of a trilogy caused one of the major issues. It is difficult to fully understand the motivations of the characters and intricacies of plot development in the movie without having seen and recalled the first two films. In addition, the acting of Sofia Coppola in the role of Michael’s daughter Mary is, at best, flat, with no romantic connection emanating from the scenes between her and Andy Garcia, who plays Sonny Corleone’s illegitimate son Vincent.
Sofia is central to the finale; as the curtain falls on the opera inside the Massimo, it also falls on Mary Corleone’s life as she takes a bullet from an assassin that was meant for her father. The choice of opera was no coincidence. Coppola deliberately chose Cavalleria rusticana by Mascagni, which on the surface is a simple Sicilian tale of mistrust, honour and revenge based on a Giovanni Verga story. The opera title translates as ‘rustic chivalry’ — a concept that the mafia have always wanted to own and project to the wider public. ‘Rustic chivalry’ is precisely the ambient mood that floats through the early scenes of The Godfather as Don Vito holds court; it embodies his value system and his sense of judgement — a chivalry based on honour that maintains a deadly threat for those who transgress. Cavalleria rusticana manufactured this myth of a ritualistic world ruled by these homespun values of honour and violence, far from the octopus-like organisation the mafia was already becoming.
Many who have written on the mafia’s origins have commented on the popularity of the Cavalleria. Dickie is sure of its influence in diverting the public from the organisation’s real threat. Roberto M. Dainotto, in his book The Mafia: A Cultural History, reflects on Coppola’s choice of music to accompany the final moments of the trilogy, a series that he, perhaps, had grown weary of furthering. For Dainotto, either consciously or otherwise, Coppola had ended his cultural contribution to the mafia myth with the music that triggered its inception. The aged and blind Michael Corleone fades away to the strains of the Intermezzo from the very opera that nostalgically paints a world where men behave with codified honour, enacting their own law in a society that has left them to their own devices.
Coppola’s films have indeed become a cultural phenomenon, but one that has left Sicily synonymous with the image of Vito Andolini in his guise as Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone. Cross the road from the entrance to The Palms and take any side street with a souvenir shop and it is extremely likely that the vision of Brando’s distorted face will appear on anything from a T-shirt, tea towel or ashtray to a cigarette lighter. It might seem that this type of merchandise is essential to a healthy tourist trade when so many foreign visitors have this film as a point of reference, but there is a horrible irony in the marketing of such trinkets. The shops that display and sell Brando’s image — the image of a man who embodies the concept of mafia protection — will be paying the pizzo, the local word for protection money.
It prompts the question as to why any Sicilian would want to glorify and promulgate a topic that has so dented the island’s image. One answer can be found in the reflected glory of Hollywood success, which works on the principle that any publicity is good publicity and that the spotlight is enough of a draw, irrespective of the subject matter that lies beneath the surface. Don Corleone’s ‘rustic chivalry’ is a nod to the past, albeit stylised, which has created a stasis worthy of Lampedusa’s timeworn Prince Salina, the man who warned of upstart mafiosi like Don Calogero.
There are locals who boycott establishments that market Brando to tourists, but Sicily has clearly not escaped the drip feed of Godfather associations embedded in our collective psyche. During a food festival in a hill town near Palermo, we fell into conversation with a group of twenty-something Sicilians. Talk turned to dialect and representations of the island in world cinema. Their first point of reference for the use of the Sicilian language in a popular film was De Niro in The Godfather Part II. One of your authors was wearing a black waistcoat and it was at this point in the conversation that three of the young men, who were university-educated, turned to each other and pointed at the garment. With admiring glances, they muttered that it resembled the attire sported by De Niro in the film. There was no irony or gentle teasing — just an observational respect for Coppola’s work.
It is even more surprising that these impressions linger when events in the 1980s and 1990s shattered any remaining notions of the mafia as anything other than an open wound, a complex criminal organisation regularly infected with drug money from America. Heroin became even bigger business and the money generated had to go somewhere for laundering purposes. Financial scandals ensued that even reached the hallowed turf of the Vatican and its banking interests when the financier Michele Sindona (‘The Shark’) and the banker Roberto Calvi (‘God’s Banker’) both died in mysterious circumstances. Sindona was already serving a life sentence for murder after having been previously convicted of perjury, fraud and the mismanagement of funds. He died in prison from cyanide that had found its way into his coffee. In 1982, Calvi was found dangling from scaffolding under Blackfriars Bridge in London, a supposed suicide. Later investigations revealed the suicide to have been staged — the choice of Blackfriars was undoubtedly symbolic, since Calvi was a member of P2, a pseudo-masonic lodge whose members referred to themselves as the frati neri, the ‘black friars’.
As the banking scandals became front page news, the Sicilian mafia was engaged in a ruthless internal fight to the death that saw the Corleonesi family establish ultimate control. Hundreds died in the Second Mafia War including many so-called cadaveri eccellenti (literally, the excellent cadavers), in other words, those who died whilst holding significant positions in the state apparatus, notably the politicians Piersanti Mattarella and Pio La Torre. Both these men were involved in the fight against the mafia, with Mattarella trying to put an end to corruption in the building industry and Pio La Torre promoting the mafia conspiracy law. General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa was another casualty of the conflict. He had been sent to Palermo in 1982 with the specific task of stopping the violence. His car was forced off the road by armed gunmen on motorbikes and the occupants, including his bodyguard and wife, were riddled with bullets.
Some mafiosi, known as pentiti, broke ranks and enabled the judiciary to fight back. Pentito translates as ‘penitent’ or ‘repentant’, although those who turned state’s evidence were more likely to be fearful for their lives than repentant of their crimes. One judge in particular, Giovanni Falcone, knew the value of these testimonies and, perhaps more importantly, the means of eliciting them. Falcone had grown up in the La Kalsa district of Palermo where he would have mixed with all levels of Palermitan society. He knew the mafia mindset and could converse on their level. Using Pio La Torre’s law that made mafia association illegal, and with the help of pentiti like Tommaso Buscetta, he was able to build a strong case against the mafia leadership. Working alongside him was Paolo Borsellino, another crusading judge who also grew up in La Kalsa.
By 1986 the anti-mafia pool of judges was ready to prosecute hundreds of defendants in what became known as the maxi-trial. Scores of journalists, both national and international, descended on The Palms, turning the hotel’s public spaces into an ante-courtroom. Reporters littered the foyer, urgently scribbling notes, talking into dictaphones and anticipating the events to come. The day’s proceedings were mulled over with a glass of wine or whisky from Librizzi’s bar. The judicial attack on the mafia was unprecedented, which took great courage, and the press knew they were reporting a momentous story.
The real courtroom was a specially constructed bunker inside Palermo’s Ucciardone prison. High-level security and bullet-proof glass was much in evidence, but the effort proved worthwhile as the maxi-trial led to 360 convictions. However, rather than dissuade the Corleonesi from their path of violence, the trial merely provoked them further. Cadaveri eccellenti continued to fall including Salvo Lima, the ex-Mayor of Palermo and member of the European Parliament who was gunned down in 1992 on his way from Mondello, a beach resort near the city. Lima was not an anti-mafia warrior, but a politician who had been linked with the Sack of Palermo and the accompanying building contracts issued without due process. Lima was part of the faction in the Christian Democrat Party that supported Giulio Andreotti. Historians such as John Dickie have reported testimony from pentiti that claim Lima was assassinated because he had not kept promises regarding the lessening of sentences handed out during the maxi-trial.
Two months after the death of Lima, the whole of Italy was shocked by an incident that would impact Italians in much the same way that the death of John F. Kennedy affected Americans. People can tell you where they were and what they were doing when the news filtered through. Giovanni Falcone, exhausted by his constant battle with Cosa Nostra in his homeland, had accepted a post in Rome where he had effectively set up district offices designed to combat organised crime. He had also been instrumental in blocking a review of sentences for those convicted in the maxi-trial. On 23 May, Falcone took a car from the island’s airport at Punta Raisi and was travelling home when the road beneath him erupted at Capaci. The escort car containing three police agents was thrown from the road, killing all inside. Falcone and his wife, Francesca Morvillo, were ejected through their windscreen with no hope of survival. The explosion, which registered on earthquake-monitoring equipment, was no natural phenomenon, but a bomb planted by the mafia.
When fellow judge Paolo Borsellino heard the news, he knew his days were numbered. The events after Falcone’s assassination are immortalised in the film The 57 Days, a reference to the amount of time left to Borsellino. Luca Zingaretti, of Inspector Montalbano fame, plays the magistrate, who kept a red notebook detailing all his investigations on his person at all times. Borsellino was at the time in conversation with a pentito that he had visited in Rome, during which he was told of two supposedly corrupt officials. Before he had a chance to investigate further, he was assassinated in Palermo’s Via D’Amelio where he was visiting his mother. The explosion from the nearby car also killed his bodyguards, amongst whom was Emanuela Loi, the first female police protection officer ever to be appointed in Italy. The red notebook disappeared from the scene. Investigations into Borsellino’s murder are still ongoing and have centred on collusion between the state and Cosa Nostra.
In 1993, the Corleonesi boss Totò Riina was finally apprehended in Palermo after twenty-three years on the run. Nicknamed ‘Shorty’ or ‘The Beast’, Riina had been in hiding throughout the events of these years. From his redoubt, he had orchestrated the tentacle-like branches of an organisation that had infiltrated many aspects of society. The man who became the de facto boss once Riina had been jailed was Bernardo Provenzano, who had been a fugitive for even longer. Provenzano’s reign saw less violence directed at the State. Despite his need to constantly move from place to place, he maintained control of operations through pizzini, small notes coded via, of all things, passages in the Bible. The notes were hand-delivered to the people that mattered. Provenzano was eventually arrested in 2006 by the police who had tracked a lorry delivering the laundry that had recently driven away from his family home. His hideout was remarkably close to Corleone.
The momentous events of 1992 took place during the premiership of Giulio Andreotti (1919–2013), one of Italy’s longest-serving political figures. Andreotti was a native of Lazio and attended school and university in Rome. Having graduated in law, his political career took off when he became a member of the National Council of the newly-formed Christian Democrats in 1944. During the 1950s and 1960s, Andreotti held a number of ministerial positions, eventually becoming Prime Minister for the first time in 1972 and then again in 1976. His third tenure ended in June 1992 when he resigned at the end of the legislature. Newly made a Senator for Life, Andreotti decided to stand for the presidency of the Italian Republic. The presidential election took place in the wake of the assassination of Falcone and those members of parliament and deputies entitled to vote veered away from the old warrior, plumping instead for the compromise candidate, Oscar Luigi Scalfaro.
The taint of scandal was now beginning to dog Andreotti’s footsteps. It was Salvo Lima’s death that raised some serious questions for the former Prime Minister. The judiciary started to wonder how much he knew of Lima’s dubious connections. In 1993 Andreotti was put on trial in Palermo for mafia association. The document published by the Public Prosecutor’s Office and detailing the introductory exposition from the criminal proceedings specifically mentions Lima but, of particular interest to us, it also cites meetings held at The Palms between two very wealthy Sicilian businessmen, Antonio and Ignazio Salvo, and Christian Democrat politicians. The Salvos, who were cousins, had been prosecuted for mafia association in the maxi-trial. Antonio died of natural causes during the trial, whilst Ignazio was convicted and later assassinated.
The prosecution document goes on to state that one of The Palms’ barmen often saw the Salvos in the hotel where they kept a suite. The cousins met with Lima and also with other local politicians from the east of the island, some of whom would stay at the establishment on a regular basis when in Palermo. Lima came to the hotel specifically with the aim of seeing the Salvos together with the others. The prosecution alleged that the Salvos’ conversation included exhortations to the politicians that they fulfil certain tasks which the cousins had already committed themselves to achieving.
Andreotti denied ever meeting the Salvos, despite the fact that images of the businessmen and the politician were produced during the trial. The initial verdict of the court in 1999 completely acquitted him, but the prosecution took the case to the Court of Appeal, where the final decision was delivered in 2003. The appeal judges stated that Andreotti had made himself available to the mafia until the spring of 1980, after which he had demonstrated a commitment to the anti-mafia cause. The time-frame stated was an important factor as Italy’s statute of limitations meant that older prosecutions would lapse beyond a certain date, therefore Andreotti was exonerated. He was also cleared in another trial in Perugia, where he was charged with complicity in the murder of journalist Mino Pecorelli who was thought to have information that could destroy his political career. The prosecution case, that the mafia had killed Pecorelli for Andreotti, was upheld on appeal but finally dismissed through lack of evidence by the Court of Cassation.
Whether Andreotti was or was not guilty, he was the epitome of a Machiavellian politician. Throughout his career, he attracted many caustic nicknames, amongst which were Belzebù (Beelzebub), the Black Pope, the Sphinx, Moloch and the Hunchback. It was Bettino Craxi, his political opponent, who coined the first devilish epithet which is somewhat ironic given that Craxi fled Italy to avoid corruption charges. The most evocative sobriquet attached to Andreotti is Il Divo — literally, the divine one — which became the title of Paolo Sorrentino’s acclaimed film that portrayed the politician’s life. The term is associated with celebrity but, in this context, there is a nuanced sarcasm alluding to his remarkable political survival.
Throughout his career, Andreotti had occasionally stayed at The Palms. In an interview with Toti Librizzi, the author Egidio Morici asked the barman if it was true that the politician used to enter the hotel through the main entrance and leave through a secondary exit in order to meet people in secret, leading everyone to believe that he was still in his hotel room. Such rumours were commonplace for a man of Andreotti’s reputation for political cunning and gnomic behaviour.
Librizzi refuted the claim, but went on to illustrate Andreotti’s character by telling Morici that he had refused to draw a design in his autograph book; instead writing, ‘To Toti, Giulio Andreotti, hopeless at drawing’. This was a charismatic way of being self-deprecating whilst avoiding the request. Librizzi says that the politician considered art a special talent that he did not possess. During the time of Andreotti’s trial, the actor and cabaret performer Oreste Lionello was staying at The Palms. In response to Librizzi’s usual request for a doodle, the performer drew a caricature of Andreotti and wrote ‘a piede libero’ which can be translated as ‘on the loose’ or ‘on the run’.
Senator for Life, Giulio Andreotti died at the age of ninety-four in 2013 from respiratory problems. His incredibly long political career led one journalist to ask him whether being in power was wearing him out. Always ready with a quick rejoinder, he replied, ‘power wears out those who don’t have it’. As noted by author Peter Bondanella, this bitter truism found its way into the mouth of Calò, a corrupt banker in The Godfather Part III, whispered into the ear of master criminal Lucchesi as Calò stabs him in the neck. Coppola may have had one eye on political developments in Italy, but he was too removed, as an American, to analyse matters from the inside. The film director Francesco Rosi (1922–2015) however had the advantage of proximity and experience.
Rosi was born in Naples and found fame with his cinematic portrayal of the Mattei oil scandal, as well as his aforementioned depiction of Salvatore Giuliano. In 1990, he released Dimenticare Palermo (Forgetting Palermo), a film loosely based on Edmonde Charles-Roux’s 1966 book Oublier Palerme. In collaboration with the writers Gore Vidal and Tonino Guerra, he took some of Charles-Roux’s plot lines and liberally interspersed them with his own Sicilian content, including a hotel and its manager, a mysterious aristocratic resident, an American politician with a radical drug policy and mafia men with too many vested interests. Rosi knew the history of The Palms and the enigmatic Baron Di Stefano, and saw them as a perfect fit for his film, which would be released in the English-speaking world as The Palermo Connection.
As critics have pointed out, the film was incorrectly marketed as a thriller rather than a political exposé and there were some dubious casting decisions, especially the cut-glass Englishman Joss Ackland as the mafia boss and James Belushi as the lead character. The film’s value lies in its ability to explore the connections between power and organised crime, raising questions of policy, corruption and society’s fatalistic attitude to the issues concerned. Belushi plays the role of Carmine Bonavia, a candidate running for the Mayor of New York under the slogan, ‘To Make a Difference’. One of his major initiatives is the opening of drug rehabilitation centres in poor neighbourhoods. On the campaign trail, he meets a female journalist from Palermo who provokes him into thinking more deeply about society’s attitudes to drugs.
Realising he needs a major strategy to reverse his flagging position in the polls, he somewhat cynically adopts the policy of legalising drugs. His father, a Sicilian immigrant, is truly horrified, understanding that reprisals from the mafia, who control the extremely lucrative narcotics trade between Palermo and New York, would be swift and deadly. Bonavia tells his father to reassure the mafiosi who frequent his restaurant that the initiative is simply a vote catcher and he has no intention of putting it into practice once elected. The conversation with the Palermitan journalist also prompted Bonavia to cancel his forthcoming honeymoon to Venice in favour of rediscovering his family’s roots in Sicily’s capital.
Now riding high in the polls, the mayoral candidate and his new wife cross the Atlantic and check into the Grand Hotel which, although a set, is clearly intended to represent The Palms. The hotel manager Gianni Mucci, played by Philippe Noiret, takes the couple around his prestigious establishment, pointing out the bust of Wagner, a clear copy of the original in The Palms, and proudly tells them that the grand piano was last played by Rubenstein. As they step into the hotel’s lounge, complete with its large television, Mucci turns to Bonavia and gestures towards a comfortable chair, saying that it was Lucky Luciano’s favourite, where he would sit for hours watching TV.
Baron Di Stefano’s doppelganger, referred to as ‘the Prince’, is played by a now aged Vittorio Gassman. He first makes an appearance on one of the hotel’s terraces, tending to his caged birds, an obvious metaphor for his own gilded imprisonment. He tells Bonavia’s wife that they are his family before going on to lament the passing of the hotel’s golden years which saw visits from the crowned heads of Europe, now replaced by package tourists. Fascinated by such an unusual character, she asks the aristocrat if she can take a photograph of him outside the hotel where the light is better. He simply replies that he never goes outside the building. Subsequently, on meeting an American diplomat, the newly-weds learn the reason for the Prince’s reticence — the self-same story attributed to Baron Di Stefano.
Mysteriously, during the first days of Bonavia’s visit, bunches of white jasmine make a disturbing appearance, turning up at his dinner table, in his horse-drawn carriage and even in his hotel bedroom. It turns into an even more ominous threat when he realises that the delicate flower is very difficult to find during the hot summer weather. He becomes obsessed with tracking down the youth who first offered a bunch of these flowers to his wife whilst sitting at a café table. He believes the young man will be able to tell him who is behind these veiled threats. Subsequently, when eating octopus in the Vucciria, he spots the seller and corners him. As they start to fight, onlookers join in and, in the melee, the young man is stabbed with a knife belonging to a fishmonger — a brutal homage to Guttuso’s famous painting. The blame falls on Bonavia, but the incident is clearly a setup. The jasmine seller is taken to hospital, fighting for his life.
Bonavia is told that he will face no charges if the youth survives as it will be classed as self-defence; however, if he dies, a trial and long sentence is on the horizon. The shaken politician retreats to the hotel where he has dinner with the Prince, who, clothed elegantly in white linen, recommends the dressed crab, claiming that he had taught the chef to make it in the finest English fashion. With throwaway sang-froid, he tells Bonavia that the jasmine vendor will surely die if ‘they’ want him out of the picture badly enough. As a knowing aside, Gassman’s character turns the conversation to the heat and lack of jasmine. In a veiled piece of advice, he explains that the only source for the flower in such weather is near a spring on the way to Trapani.
Losing no time, Bonavia throws off his police minders and heads to the specified location where he encounters the mafia boss behind the threats. He asks him to let the young man live only to be told that he had already died an hour previously. The boss is emphatic that Bonavia will be tried for manslaughter and found guilty, implying the judiciary are in his pocket. He offers an alternative solution where the American politician’s innocence is proven by irrefutable photographic evidence, on the condition that he drop any notion of legalising drugs — a policy that Bonavia had, ironically, come to believe in. With a new understanding and a defeatist attitude, the mayoral candidate returns to New York and embarks on reversing the manifesto commitment.
The camera cuts to Bonavia in New York, about to dig the first symbolic shovel of earth from the site of a new drug rehabilitation centre, thereby reverting to his former policy, which he now sees as futile but expedient. Belushi’s character stands silent as his thoughts race and he passes the shovel to a nearby cleric, unable to proceed. He realises that he is breaking a promise to the éminence grise he had met in Sicily, a decision he will shortly pay for in a hail of bullets.
The film is very much of its time, the period at the end of the 1980s when Sicily was experiencing the worst excesses of mafia violence. Rosi’s plot, enlivened by Vidal’s characteristically acerbic dialogue, is intended to examine the root causes of organised crime’s hold on certain aspects of political and civil society. Although not entirely successful in achieving its aims, the film stands as an example of an auteur film director’s attempt at laying bare a complex issue, whilst lacing his story with colourful vignettes taken from recent Sicilian folklore. The hotel and its resident prince are the steadfast witnesses to yet another convoluted human drama, a repetition of history they have sadly observed too many times before. In this, Rosi succeeded.
Sicily has, fortunately, left behind the extremes seen at this point in its history. A new wave of young, well-informed campaigners are starting to challenge the accepted price of accommodating the mafia. Addiopizzo is a movement that intends to confront the collection of protection money extorted from local businesses. Organisations that refuse the so-called pizzo now display the movement’s logo in their shop or restaurant windows. Some of the products sold in these businesses are grown on land confiscated from convicted mafiosi, thereby creating a corruption-free cycle of production, manufacture and retail. The movement also works with local schoolchildren, educating them in a culture that promotes legality and an ‘anti-racket’ mentality.
The Palms, like its fictional counterpart, has witnessed the best and worst of its city’s extremes. It is no surprise that film-makers and authors want to draw on the hotel’s history as a plot device in their narratives. Gaetano Savatteri, the author who featured the tale of that other eccentric baron, La Lomia, in his book I siciliani, uses one more of the hotel’s clandestine political meetings in his 2003 work La ferita di Vishinskij (Vyshinsky’s Wound). The title refers to Stalin’s prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky who liaised with Sicily’s Communist Party during World War II.
Vyshinsky (1883–1954) was one of the chief judicial figures in the dictator’s Great Purge, the wave of repression that took place between 1936 and 1938 which targeted anyone deemed politically suspect, from Communist apparatchiks to unsuspecting peasants and army leaders — essentially, anyone thought to be a threat to Uncle Joe’s leadership. Vyshinsky’s rhetorical flourishes were laden with the most scathing language, designed to heap the utmost denigration on his foes. Trotsky’s supporters were ‘mad dogs’ and enemies of the state were the ‘dregs of society’ and ‘stinking carrion’.
After the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, the prosecutor was transferred from Moscow to Kuibyshev where he remained loyal to the leadership. Stalin rewarded him with an appointment to the Allied Control Council for Italian affairs. Initially, he busied himself with shipping former Russian POWs back to the Soviet Union, whether they wanted to go or not. As an Italian Communist movement began to gain a foothold in the political vacuum left by the collapse of Fascism, Vyshinsky saw an opportunity to liaise with his international brethren. He was trying to manoeuvre the local Communist Party into a dominant position, from which it could take advantage when Italy once again became a fully functioning constitutional state. Historians have analysed new documentation that has come to light and discovered that, at the time, the country’s Communists were much in thrall to Stalin’s Russia.
In December 1943, Vyshinsky turned his attention to Sicily. He asked the British how many Fascists had been tried and shot since the island had fallen to the Allies and was seemingly unimpressed to learn that a mere 1,500 were in prison. He descended on Palermo for a flying visit with the intention of bolstering Communism in Sicily whilst at the same time trying to avert moves towards an independent island. The man he met was Giovanni Montalbano, who had actively encouraged his visit. Some say that the pair reputedly met in a suite at The Palms. Gaetano Savatteri takes a novelist’s liberty with the facts, interweaving Vyshinsky’s visit with multiple semi-fictional plot lines revolving around the mysterious death of a young girl, Maddalena Pancamo, who disappeared from a ferry between Naples and Palermo in 1985.
Librarian Leonardo Lo Nardo decides to dig deeper into the events around Maddalena’s death which leads him to a feud between the Pancamo and Pintacorona families and a conspiracy at The Palms in 1960, based on the true story of a scandalous meeting at the hotel. The scandal involved the politician Silvio Milazzo, who sought to squeeze the political middle ground by bringing together the unlikely bedfellows of left and right in a coalition government — in a political strategy termed milazzismo after him. His second term as President of the Sicilian Region was beginning to fall apart in 1960 as the Christian Democrats began to gain enough ground to take a majority. Ludovico Corrao, chief ideologue of the Sicilian Christian Social Union (UCSC), Milazzo’s new party, and the Communist Vincenzo Marrano had identified Christian Democrats who they thought could be persuaded to jump ship and support Milazzo’s government, one of whom was councillor and Mayor of Barcellona Carmelo Santalco.
Corrao and Marrano met Santalco in room 128 with the intention of offering suitable inducements, supposedly enough to sway the Mayor who spent his days as a stationmaster to prop up their majority in the Regional Assembly. They were unaware however that Santalco was a committed politician who was playing his own game. He had already reported the meeting to the future President of the Region, Giuseppe D’Angelo, who instigated the placing of microphones under Santalco’s bed in order to record the conversation. The resultant uproar split apart Milazzo’s government when the attempted bribery and corruption — involving 100 million lire — was revealed. Savatteri quotes newspaper reports in his book to lend authenticity to the story.
He sets Vyshinsky’s meeting with Montalbano in the Hotel Excelsior, not The Palms, where Stalin’s prosecutor is accompanied by Russian minders. As Vyshinsky shakes the hand of the Sicilian Communist, Savatteri adds the flourish of a gunshot that fells the lawyer, leaving his shirt impregnated with blood — a wound that seems to be far worse than it really is. Witnesses are summarily told by the Russian minders that the incident never happened. As the novel progresses, a man in the US claims to be Vyshinsky, despite the fact that he had actually died in 1954. He asserts that the death was staged so that he could disappear and avoid the possible retaliation of the Khrushchev government. Before an investigation can be conducted and the man identified via the wound on his chest, he commits suicide.
Savatteri’s story is complex in its interplay between fact and fiction, knotting and loosening numerous threads to invite the reader into this multi-layered tale of corruption and intrigue. The fact that The Palms was the chosen location for the real-life meeting upon which Savaterri’s fiction is modelled is no coincidence — the building is a physical manifestation of Palermo’s tortuous history, a silent witness to the machinations of duelling aristocrats, Fascist agents, spies, corrupt politicians, the representatives of organised crime and Cold War warriors, not to mention hedonistic writers and actors. Such a rich and famous, if not infamous, history made the outcry even greater when it was mooted in 2013 that The Palms might be closing its doors for good.
Toti Librizzi was so dismayed by this turn of events that he was moved to write an open letter which was published in the newspaper La Repubblica under the title ‘Salvate il mio Hotel delle Palme’ (‘Save my Palms Hotel’). In fact, the proposed closure made a considerable splash in all Sicily’s local papers from Ragusa in the south-east to the Aeolian Islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea as well as other national dailies such as La Stampa. Statements came from the regional government that they could not simply stand by and watch the demise of such an iconic institution, not to mention the loss of so many jobs.
The company that owned The Palms, Acqua Marcia, was looking to reorganise its Sicilian assets and had formally notified the hotel sector’s leading body, Federalberghi, that it intended to close the hotel. Despite the fact that Federalberghi had recorded increasing visitor numbers to Palermo in the year preceding the announcement, the gap between The Palms’ income and the cost of running the establishment was still deemed too wide. Crisis meetings were held in December 2013. Librizzi compared the closure to being evicted from his own home, despite having retired some years previously. He spoke for many Palermitans when he lamented the planned demise in emotive and plaintive terms, feeling that the hotel’s end would be yet another blow to the fabric of the city’s history. His most poignant remark sums up the hotel’s impact in a more heartfelt manner than any journalist or historian could achieve: ‘The albergo at 398 Via Roma is the crossroads through which much of twentieth-century culture has passed.’
He urged the city’s governmental institutions to rally in defence of the venerable establishment in which he had lent a confidential ear to many at his bar whose ‘secrets surfaced in whisky glasses’. The writer Leonardo Sciascia, who we know concerned himself with an investigation into the demise of the French author Raymond Roussel, was one of Librizzi’s friendly customers and one who referred to the barman as his colleague — both men were students of the human condition and understood their motivations and manoeuvres. This is quite a compliment coming from the lips of a man of Sciascia’s stature, known, as he was, for his piercing insight. From his exposure of mafia omertà in The Day of the Owl to his work focusing on the death of Aldo Moro, or the historical resonances of The Council of Egypt, in which a fake history of Arab-Sicily is discovered, Sciascia had always been a man of conscience concerned with the vagaries of his island condition.
Librizzi, as if a character in one of Sciascia’s novels, questioned the unbelievable prospect of ending The Palms’ long and rich history with emptiness, a vacuum, a cul-de-sac from which it would never emerge. The appeals from the hotel’s famous barman and many others with respect for its cultural value did not fall on deaf ears. By the following February, things were beginning to look up. Acqua Marcia came to an agreement with the Ufficio Provinciale del Lavoro (Regional Labour Office) and the unions, negotiating a compromise deal to minimise redundancies with some staff sacrificing full-time for part-time hours. Although not satisfactory to all parties, it meant that the hotel’s doors could stay open.
The La Repubblica article in which Toti Librizzi made his plea features him in a photograph from the 1970s with the ballerina, Carla Fracci. Both are smiling, standing in front of row upon row of bottles — everything from VAT 69 to Chivas Regal. Such an eclectic range of beverage choice was one of the casualties when the hotel emerged from its struggle to stay open. The alcove-like bar, situated up a small flight of stairs behind the foyer, became a ghost of its former self. The wood-framed shelving, inlaid with mirrors, remained, but there was little else left that gave a clue to its past identity. Gone were the chairs and low, round tables, replaced by a display cabinet protecting some scant reminders of the hotel’s former glories, including a signed photo of Raymond Roussel. Although a small whisper of The Palms’ past, one cannot help but feel that the space would be a fitting home to Toto Librizzi’s Casa museo della memoria, where the memorabilia could eloquently speak for itself in the surroundings that prompted its collection.
The hotel is no longer part of the Acqua Marcia/AMT group and has been taken over by Algebris who, at the time of writing, have temporarily closed the doors for renovation with an opening date of 2020. Before its closure, walking the public spaces of the reprieved hotel felt akin to mixing with the transient spirits of the past. The Blue Room (Sala Azzura), sometimes referred to as the Palmetta restaurant, was often empty apart from a large round table in the centre, and a few comfortable chairs pushed to the edges, ready to be positioned at a moment’s notice should the occasion arise. The low hum of diners chattering over their food was difficult to conjure in the elegant silence, yet, strangely, the hushed atmosphere lent itself to the vivid picture of an Ingham-Whitaker moving aside the gilt mirror that still hides the passageway leading to the Anglican Church opposite. Clearly, Baron Di Stefano would have known about this secret tunnel and perhaps considered its opportunities whilst dining with the rich and famous. Vittorio Gassman springs to mind, playing the role of the Prince in The Palermo Connection in which he laments a passing world, replaced by mass tourism.
The snob in Gassman’s aristocrat would have been horrified to see guests at the breakfast buffet in the magnificent surroundings of the Sala Specchi, wearing Bermuda shorts and baggy T-shirts. The Sala has undoubtedly been one of Palermo’s most glamorous backdrops in which to take an early morning brioche, juice and cappuccino. The individual tables were still laid with fine white linen draped over golden underskirts in the futile expectation of receiving a nobleman or film star. Sadly, for much of the day the room remained in shadow, but a member of staff would happily flip the switches to reveal the play of light and reflection. The harshness of electric bulbs, however, would also highlight patches of wear on the pink wallpaper, as if the candles of yesteryear had guttered to a sooty end.
As your authors walked the halls in search of those magical numbers that harboured the hotel’s secrets, we realised it was a somewhat fruitless exercise. The bland exterior of room 224 would not have witnessed the demise of Raymond Roussel and rooms 24, 25 and 26 had nothing to do with the birth of Parsifal. Regrettably, the years saw a renumbering of the hotel suites although the composer’s name lived on in the Sala Wagner, used for conferences and meetings. The room was regimented with rows of straight-backed chairs in corporate red, all facing towards the long table at the front where the chairperson or speaker of the day would be stationed. Nothing quite removes the romance of an artistic locale as much as the commercial uniformity of modern-day business. A cut-glass chandelier hovered over the sea of chairs, imposing its seniority and provenance.
Survival has dictated a degree of accommodation with the needs of international business but, with rose-tinted spectacles, it is easy to forget that The Palms has always been intricately associated with people of commercial instinct. After all, it was Benjamin Ingham’s entrepreneurial spirit that enabled its creation and the Florio family were frequent visitors during their period of dominance and expansion. The Belle Époque designs of Ernesto Basile were as much the setting for a business deal as the sleek chrome and glass which witness the corporate exchanges of today. Whispered encounters once saw the transfer of considerable sums between interested parties, occasionally ignoring the letter of the law according to the current tenets of the Guardia di Finanza.
Not all of the events held in the hotel’s hallowed halls were so tasteless in nature. A swift perusal of recent activities prior to the renovation reveals the establishment’s role as a cultural hub. Damiano Calabrese organised an event called Amor librorum, using The Palms as an exhibition space for the display of books of considerable antiquity, including the remarkable Annali della felice città di Palermo (Annals of the Happy City of Palermo) by Agostino Inveges, printed in 1649. The same organiser has also promoted the exposition of nineteenth-century engravings and traveller’s tales from foreign authors who wrote about Sicily during the same era.
Occasionally, the hotel’s displays are self-referential, as was the case with the 2018 initiative simply entitled ‘Raymond’, an homage to Raymond Roussel who breathed his last in 1933. The project was created by Luca Trevisani and counted on the collaboration of the German conceptual artist, Olaf Nicolai, who wrote to twenty-nine international authors and artists, inviting them to participate. Activities included a reading of The Punk, a Gideon Sams novel by contemporary artist Aleksandra Mir, with the added twist that she sat on the bed in her hotel room dressed in pyjamas and expected all her guests to be similarly attired. Other lucky guests were able to find a napkin embroidered with a capital ‘R’ at their breakfast table, or to receive a printed drawing from Ute Müller enclosed with their hotel invoice.
One of the more macabre exhibits was from Massimo Bartolini who displayed a large black and white print in room 121 which was a pseudo-technical architectural design, a method of killing oneself, which he named ‘Suicide Machine’. Michael Dean chose to suspend a billiard tablecloth on frames in room 347, a reference to Roussel’s method of writing which he elaborated in the text How I Wrote Certain of My Books. As briefly touched upon previously (see chapter 3), the Frenchman would take the word ‘billard’, for example, and its rhyming pair ‘pillard’ (looter), and then add similar words which would lead two almost identical sentences in different directions. A further creative twist came from Lucia Amara who designed postcards dedicated to Roussel’s travels that were distributed widely throughout the rooms and corridors of the establishment.
Trevisani and Nicolai’s vision turned the entirety of The Palms into a surprising gallery of reminiscence and modern reinterpretation. It was a fitting stage for such an original idea, an autodidactic labyrinth of rediscovery and reformation, proving that the slow demise of this esteemed venue is far from inevitable. It is to be hoped that the renovations of 2019–20 will reinvigorate this icon of Palermitan life, whilst honouring the essence of its unique heritage. Like an aged aristocrat, clinging to life through lack of an heir, The Palms, one of Palermo’s epic bastions of the Belle Époque, faces an uncertain path. It will have to continue the task of reinvention in a century with which it seems to be increasingly at odds. Ultimately, the building’s charm does not lie wholly in its fabric, but rather in its ghosts — the less tangible elements of its history that may yet give it a future.