Letters | Sunday, 30 November 2008

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Mafia-free Ragusa? Not exactly

I found the Malta-Sicily exchange involving remarks made by a Maltese estate agent rather amusing from one angle, and possibly sinister from another.
So they say Ragusa is a provincia babba? Of course we use the same word in Maltese to mean ‘naïve’, ‘simple’, ‘innocent’. So as far as we can tell, Sicilians reckon that a province free of mafia activity is silly, naïve, missing out on the real action possibly – good luck to them, but they should not be too surprised if others do not see the matter in the same light.
But opinions apart, there must be serious, objective doubt about the existence of any provincia babba in Sicily. Messina had the reputation of a provincia babba in the middle and late 1980s. In fact there was plenty of mafia activity, not least in the provision of safe havens for mafiosi on the run – from quite humble picciotti to heavyweights like Nitto Santa Paola, the Catania boss. As a result of the chance discovery of these presences, a young girl and a reporter were brutally murdered. Justice took a long time to bring the murderers to book.
Then there was the Sodom and Gomorra of the University of Messina, with every form of abuse imaginable sanctioned by the highest authorities. Physical violence, abetted by students from that other provincia babba (Reggio Calabria) across the water, was not absent. There was one fatality – a member of the medical faculty gunned down in his car while stopped at traffic lights talking to his wife on a mobile phone. A colleague was accused but found not guilty.
As for Ragusa, a recent investigation into the vegetable market at Vittoria, found that the place was run by una società fantasma (phantom operation), and as such not accountable. Now it is unlikely that the CEO of this company is the ghost of Vittoria Colonna after which the place is named; it is more likely to be a member of l’onorata società. And of course one cannot forget that the predecessor of Sig. Raffaele Lombardo – he of the nuclear gaffe – was convicted of association with individual members of the Mafia but not, as he went to great pains to emphasise, with the Mafia in general. Sicilians, like us for that matter, are experts at subtle distinctions in matters of behaviour.

Edward A. Mallia
Attard

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