Page 154 - The Rough Guide of Sicily

Sicily. The town’s main piazza was packed to welcome him home in 1946, and he

repaid the adulation by opening Lercara Friddi’s first cinema – apparently with a
screening of the gangster movie, Little Caesar. A few kilometres north of Lercara,
you pick up the SS121, which winds across the entire length of Sicily from Catania
to finish its run in Palermo. One final (signposted) stop is at Bagni di Cefalà,
eleventh-century Arab baths, still flowing with thermal waters which the locals use

for washing clothes, though you can swim here too. Few other examples of Arab
architecture in Sicily are in such good condition.

CIDMA

CIDMA Via Orfanotrofio 7 • Open daily, guided tours available, though best to email or call first • 091 8452
4295, info@cidma.it • • Corleone, Come and See 340 402 5601, cidmacorleone@gmail.com

Off the central Piazza Garibaldi, close to the Comune, CIDMA (International Centre
for the Documentation of the Mafia and the Anti-Mafia Movement) is an anti-Mafia
museum where you can trace the violent history of both Corleone and the Mafia, not
only through brutal photographs (taken and donated by photographer Letizia Battaglia)
of the so-called “Mafia Wars”, but also by examining displays of original documents
used in the maxi-trials of the 1980s. It’s a sobering experience, though current street

names in town at least demonstrate a contemporary corleonese desire to make amends
(Piazza Víttime della Mafia, Piazza Falcone e Borsellino, etc). And at dusk in the
town gardens, when couples, teenagers and families stroll under the soaring palms and
flowering oleanders, the dark dealings of earlier times seem an age away. This more
enlightened view of town is the one promoted by two local women under the name

“Corleone, Come and See” who, with a couple of days’ notice, can arrange a tailor-
made tour with an English-speaking guide and including a typically rustic corleonese
lunch.

CORLEONE AND THE MAFIA

Whether by luck or with foresight, when Mario Puzo chose the name Corleone for
his central character in The Godfather (published 1969), he picked a little-known
place that later came to have a huge significance in Mafia circles, as the native town
of many of the so-called capo di tutti capi (literally “boss of all the bosses”). Even
before Puzo’s novel, the name Corleone had a certain resonance, due to the activities

of Luciano Leggio (also known as Liggio), who had a reputation as a dashing figure
and was hailed for his long-running evasion of the forces ranged against him. He
was, however, responsible for one of the most notorious political killings of the
twentieth century, that of the trade union leader Placido Rizzoto, who had been
trying to organize peasants into staging occupations of uncultivated Mafia-owned
lands. Two years after Rizzoto’s disappearance in 1948, the fire brigade hauled out