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39 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Underpasses, Crypts, Holes and Hiding Places", March 30, 2002
Sicily is one of those places that has seemingly been picked clean by numerous waves of invaders, from the Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs, Normans, Spanish, to in our own days the U.S. Army of Omar Bradley and George Patton. But was it really? There definitely remains a hard core of hardcore Sicilian-ness that finds its perfect expression in the mafia with all its traditions of silence, corruption, violence, and faithfulness onto death.But how does one approach such a vast reserve of secrecy? Australian expatriate Peter Robb has hit upon a kind of double helix organizing principle that involves slowly rotating around its subject matter from several different points of view. In this helix are mixed food, history, culture, art, landscape, and all that is Sicily. We find Giuseppe di Lampedusa, Lucky Luciano, the painter Renato Guttuso, Michele Sindona, and the Vatican enmeshed in a kind of dance of death. But in the end, we are no closer to proof that arch-politician Giulio Andreotti sold his soul to Uncle Toto Riina of the Cosa Nostra. Arriving at this proof is not Robb's goal. His spiralling book has taken it all in and fascinated us with stories of how the fork was invented, how di Lampedusa's talent was made known to the outside world, what happened to Palermo's Vucciria market, how Guttuso's friends were all kept from visiting the dying painter by a cabal of servants -- and perhaps by Andreotti? This maddening book that goes nowhere and everywhere lacks only two things (for which I blame the publisher): maps and photographs. I kept getting lost, but I never lost interest. The lines of Eugenio Montale that form the book's epigraph describe it all: History isn't
the devastating bulldozer they say it is.
It leaves underpasses, crypts, holes
and hiding places.
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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Appalling true story of Italy's government/mafia alliance., August 22, 1998
Midnight in Sicily is a must-read for anyone--especially any American--who has been seduced by "The Godfather" into believing that members of the mafia are outlaw heroes who keep their quarrels among themselves. Peter Robb systematically destroys such notions, and more sensitive readers might not be able to stomach the appalling bloodbath of mafiosi and innocents alike he carefully documents with near-insider agility. Equally appalling is the very real toll the mafia has taken on the fabric of Italian society, from the destruction of historic city centers and ways of life in Palermo and Naples to the undermining of honest government. We are made to feel very deeply for these losses because Robb makes us intimately acquainted with the food, art, history, and honest, good people that are variously maligned, shanghaied, and bulldozed for power and profit. Robb even has some sympathy for the "man of honor" ethos of the traditional and somewhat less destructive mafia, which ultimately led repentant mafiosi (pentiti) to take down the central villain of the story, "life senator" Giulio Andreotti. This is a fascinating book, written with passion. I loved it!
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26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Italy's Dysfunctional Social Contract, September 23, 2002
Peter Robb's memoir of time spent in the Italian mezzogiorno - chiefly Sicily, but also Naples - is partly a travel book, partly a commentary on art (especially the painter Renato Guttuso) and on literature (particularly the novelists Giuseppe di Lampedusa and Leonardo Sciascia), and partly a celebration of gastronomy. Mostly, however, it is about the power of organized crime in Italy, especially in the south, and its peculiar relationship (parasitic and symbiotic) with the Italian government. The power of the mafia and camorra arose from the historic misrule of the mezzogiorno. Robb discusses their remote origins, but concentrates on events since the Allied liberation of Sicily in 1943. Mussolini had attempted to suppress the mafia, and both its Sicilian and American branches (the latter represented by "Lucky" Luciano) accordingly aided the U.S. army in driving out the fascists. The results, like those of U.S. aid to Islamic mujahideen resisting Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, demonstrate the way in which such alliances of convenience and "proxy warfare" can backfire. Robb describes how the Sicilian mafia subsequently established ties with the Christian Democratic Party (democristiani), with the tacit approval of the U.S. government and the Roman Catholic church, as an ally in the anti-communist cause. Even as this was taking place, mafiosi strengthened their connections with organized crime in other parts of the world, including the United States, and garnered unprecedented new wealth in the international drug trade. Necessary money-laundering was accomplished through penetration of the banking industry, both in Italy and abroad. Corruption of the government proceeded all the way to the top, including the prime minister, Giulio Andreotti. All governments, even corrupt and tyrannical ones, have some sort of social contract with the people governed under them. The democratic ideal holds that this should be one openly and freely reached. Dictatorships and absolute monarchies attain their social contracts by a mixture of demagogy and repression, so that the "consent of the governed" is obtained by combined elements of fraud and force. The Italian case is an especially strange one, in that government and organized crime have become so intimately connected as to appear almost two sides of the same coin. Albert Jay Nock, in "Our Enemy the State," wryly pointed out that many of the things governments do would be considered crimes if done by ordinary individuals. If the state takes life, it is called war or capital punishment. If you take life, it is called murder. If the state takes property under the threat of force, it is called confiscation or taxation; if you take property under the threat of force, it is called robbery or extortion. When the state prints banknotes that have no value other than that assigned by the state, these are called fiat money. When you print them, they are called counterfeit. The state, argued Nock, does not want to suppress crime; it wants a state monopoly on it. Many people in the south of Italy take this cynical view of their government, and have good historical reason for so doing. If rulers do not regard government as a public trust, the ruled see no reason to do so either. When government has no moral legitimacy, organized crime becomes an alternative system of social control. As Robb's account makes clear, the mafia is and always has been both a competitor and collaborator with the state. ... It is a cautionary tale about what happens to the social contract as a result of the loss of public trust, and how nearly impossible it is to restore it. "Midnight in Sicily" is a fascinating book. I did not find its discursive and digressive style as frustrating as some reviewers here, although I confess to finding some of Robb's verbal and typographic idiosyncrasies irritating. The book's one telling defect is its lack of an index, which would have been quite useful.
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