Tony Hatfield's Retired Ramblings

Excellent cadavers

Last week both The Independent and Guardian reported the Castellammarese mafia clan had muscled in whilst Steven Soderberg was on location at Scopello where he was directing "Oceans 12". Scopello is a few miles away from the clan's base at Castellammare del Golfo. An e-correspondent, who knew this town was one of my favourite holiday haunts wrote: "I've just been reading about this in the Independent ( from yesterday) you go to some dangerous places on holiday - although apparently the mafia don't kill people these days - put that one to the test if you dare.Great names though - Joe Bananas !!!" Sicily has always been a strange and troubled island. In 1876, Leopoldo Franchetti a Tuscan MP travelled to Palermo to report on an Island that had become something of a thorn in the side of the newly united Italian state. " Someone who had just arrived might well believe....that Sicily was the easiest and most pleasant places in the entire world. But if [the traveller] stays a while, begins to read newspapers and listens carefully, bit by bit everything changes around him....He hears that the guard of that orchard was killed with a rifle shot coming from behind that wall because the owner hired him rather that somebody else.....Just over there, an owner who wanted to rent his groves as he saw fit heard a bullet whistle past his head in a friendly warning and afterwards gave in.Elsewhere, a young man who had dedicated himself to setting up nursery schools in the outskirts of Palermo was shot at...because certain people who dominate the common people in that area, feared that, by benefiting the poorer classes, he would acquire some influence on the population that they wanted to reserve exclusively for themselves. The violence and murders take the strangest forms....There is a story about a former priest, who became the crime leader in a town near Palermo and administered the last rites to some of his own victims. After a certain number of these stories, the perfume of orange and lemon blossoms start to smell of corpses." Cheers. t Scopello  

posted by Tony @ Saturday, July 17, 2004