Customer Reviews

Midnight in Sicily: On Art, Food, History, Travel and la Cosa Nostra

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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!

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.

Not knowing much before about Italian culture, history and politics, Peter Robb's wonderful book has made me feel much more enlightened. It uses as its central subject the Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia, but it goes so far beyond this. This is Robb's journey into the heart of all things Italian. Not only does he allow amazing insight and understanding into the mafia - a feat in itself - but he gives his readers knowledge about Mezzogiornio politics, art, culture, gastronomy, intelligentsia and more. His subjective overview is dotted with personalities which constantly recur throuhgout the book to haunt you, characters such as: Guilio Andreotti (former Prime Minister of Italy and member of the Cosa Nostra), Salvatore Riina (the ruthless boss of the Cosa Nostra), and the late Giovanni Falcone (the miliant Palermitan chief prosecutor who initiated the mafia maxitrial in the mid-1980s). Such is the ability of Robb as a writer, he is able to get interviews with key figures in this web of intrigue - a lot of which is reproduced in the book. He often quotes from writers such as Lampedusa and Sciascia who, we learn, knew more about Sicily than most. He puts you there, in the heart of Sicily: from his stuffy boat ride into the port at Palermo at midnight up until his final coffee at midnight in the Sant'Andrea Piazza. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in more than a historical account of Italy as it uncovers all that lies behind its mysterious beauty. Alone, this book is a triumph of the spirit, but to realise that this book was written by an outsider (an Australian) is to gasp in awe at what is a little masterpiece. 5 out of 5!

I read this book during a recent one week stay in Sicily and was entranced by it and by the many perspectives it opened, not only on culture and politics in Sicily but in Italy as a whole as well. 'Midnight in Sicily' contains many interesting sections relating to the Sicilian kitchen, classical art and important literary works related to Sicily. The most gripping part of the book, however, deals with the eternal question of the Sicilian mafia and its deadly involvement with broader Italian politics. Robb offers a picture of a political system which was (is?) thoroughly corrupt and penetrated by Cosa Nostra. One is used to read such things about present day Russia for instance, but it's amazing to find out that things in Italy are basically not much better. The astonishing thing is, of course, that Italy is still widely considered a democracy in the West. This in itself is an amazing feat. The central figure in this book is the many times former minister and prime minister Giulio Andreotti. On the plane out of Sicily, I read in the paper that fifteen years was demanded against Andreotti by the prosecution in the trial against him which is presently running. If only a fraction of what Robb implies about Andreotti is true, those fifteen years are well-deserved. A truely gripping book. Reading it in Sicily is especially recommended!

This book was an impulse buy for me - what a pick up. I've never quite read anything like it: part history, part political thiller, part travelogue, part food/art criticism. It's an amazing stew that Peter Robb pulls off magnificently. He's especially enlightening on the complex character of Guilio Andreotti. You'll cast a very arched eyebrow at Andreotti's recent acquittal on all charges after reading Robb's account of 'The Honorable Senator.' If you have any interest whatsoever in post-WWII European history, this is a volume you can not live without. It's a finely researched set of insights into Italy's evolution from 1945 to present.

This book is not structured for easy reading (if it is structured at all!). Robb writes with considerable insight about Sicilian cuisine, the great Sicilian writers Giuseppe di Lampedusa and Leonardo Sciascia, and the most famous Sicilian painter Renato Guttuso. His main focus and the raison d'ętre for his return to Italy (he earlier lived in Naples and Sicily for fourteen years) was the beginning of the trial of Giulio Andreotti, the most powerful politician in postwar Italy, lifetime senator, minister in most postwar Italian governments, and prime minister seven times.

Robb has serious criticisms of the public stances and effects of Sciascia and Guttuso, but there are also genuine heroes in his exceedingly dark narrative, specifically, the martyred magistrates Giovanni Falcone, Paolo Borsellino, carabinieri General Carlo Dalla Chiesa, anti-corruption crusading Palermo mayor (now Minister of the Interior) Leoluca Orlando, and the Countess Marzotto (Gussoto's mistress, muse, and recurrent subject).

The way the book keeps returning to Andreotti and Riina and the proliferation of names of less prominent Mafiosi and officials (not that these are distinct sets!) makes it difficult to follow, and demands a high level of commitment by readers to keeping the pieces straight - even though, as in Sciascia's fiction, the pieces of the puzzle are anything but clear and straightforward. The difficulty of following the narrative is further complicated by long discourses on Naples. Robb fails to connect the organized crime syndicates in Naples and Palermo except insofar as both are parts of the nation of Italy that is deeply compromised by Andreotti and his allies.

Although the book has a partial list of characters, it desperately needs an index so that readers can refresh their memory of who's who. Since he is writing about extremely murky realities, the plotline cannot be completely clear, but a more straightforward exposition is imaginable. It also needs an epilogue now that the Andreotti trial (the beginning of which Robb returned to Sicily for) has ended.

There is a great deal of information - not just on political/criminal collaboration but on other aspects of Sicily - in this book. I amd glad that I did not read it before going to Sicily, but it makes for fascinating reading after leaving the island that Lampedusa considered eternally exploited and misgoverned. For reading in advance or while there, I'd recommend Mary Simeti's _On Persephone's Island, instead.

This book is one of the very best I have read on an aspect of Italian life and politics.(The other is Christ Stopped At Eboli) I am going to read it again, as some of the detail is fading from memory. Robb, a long-term ex-pat writes seriously about the underbelly of Italian life, but also conveys hislove and respect for the country, its traditions and food especially!

When visiting my husbands relatives in Sicily, I found the undercurrents there present - men with rifles nd wolf-dogs standing in country lanes at dusk, protecting their orange trees, for example. My cousins not naming the menace, but refering to it obliquely, shrugging their shoulders....my uncle working two jobs, the first as a respected paramedic in an ambulance service, but earning enough for a basic existence only, but with the promise of a state pension. The second job in the afternoon in order to afford the types of consumer goods and housing that the now advanced Italian nation takes for granted. Much has changed since WW2, since the mass emigrations from a broken country. But much also remains the same and Robb gets to the heart of it beautifully.

Before I travelled to Sicily, I was looking for a book that would capture the culture of this Italian island. Other than DiLapedusa's "The Leopard" (fiction) I wasn't aware of and couldn't seem to find any other books on the island. I stumbled across this and was charmed from page one. This is really a little masterpiece of travel writing/journalism/history. Although I normally don't find time to read while travelling, I couldn't put this book down. Don't listen to any negative reviews, this book is superbly written, insighful and a very comprehensive text on Sicilian culture. It might be said that the focus is loosely Mafioso, but the author does an unmatched job at integrating history, food, and the intricasies of Sicilian society and culture. You'll be blown away. This one's for my library!

This book is such a good read, especially if you love Italy or want to learn about the island of Sicily.
The author begins with such an innocent little story and then it erupts into this full-blown expose of how and when the Mafia was "ushered" into power in Italy.
This guy can make you feel like you are walking through the now extinct marketplaces in Palermo.
I can't urge readers enough to check this book out!