Page 572 - The Rough Guide of Sicily

80,000 lost their lives. Though the high rate of emigration was a crushing indictment of

the state of affairs on the island, it had many positive effects for those left behind, who
benefited not only from huge remittances sent back from abroad but from the wage
increases that resulted from labour shortages.

The world wars

The Italian conquest of Libya in 1912 was closely followed by World War I, and
both were heavy blows to the Sicilian economy. In 1922 Mussolini gained power in

Rome and dispatched Cesare Mori to solve “the southern problem” by putting an end
to the Mafia. Free of constitutional and legal restrictions, Mori was able to imprison
thousands of suspected mafiosi. The effect was merely to drive the criminal class
deeper underground, while the alliance he forged with the landed classes to help bring
this about dissolved all the gains that had been made against the ruling elite, setting

back the cause of agrarian reform. In the 1930s Mussolini’s African concerns and his
drive for economic and agricultural self-sufficiency gave Sicily a new importance for
Fascist Italy, the island now vaunted as “the geographic centre of the empire”. In the
much publicized “Battle for Grain”, wheat production increased, though at the cost of
the diversity of crops that Sicily required, resulting in soil exhaustion and erosion.
Mussolini’s popularity on the island is best illustrated by his order, in 1941, that all

Sicilian-born officials be transferred to the mainland, on account of their possible
disloyalty.

During World War II, Sicily became the first part of Europe to be invaded by the
Allies when, in July 1943, Patton’s American Seventh Army landed at Gela, and
Montgomery’s British Eighth Army came ashore between Pachino and Pozzallo further
east. This combined army of 160,000 men was the largest ever seen in Sicily, but the
campaign was longer and harder than had been anticipated, with the Germans mainly

concerned with delaying the advance until they had moved most of their men and
equipment across the Straits of Messina. Few Sicilian towns escaped aerial
bombardment, and Messina itself was the most heavily bombed of all Italian cities
before it was taken on August 18.

Post-war Sicily

The aftermath of the war saw the most radical changes in Sicily since Unification.

With anarchy and hunger widespread, a wave of banditry and crime was unleashed,
while the Mafia were reinstated in their behind-the-scenes role as adjudicators and
powerbrokers, now allied to the landowners in the face of large-scale land
occupations by a desperate peasantry. Separatism became a potent rallying cry for
protesters of all persuasions, who believed that Sicily’s ills could best be solved by