SICILY: In Darkest Southern Europe

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As the ancient steam-driven train from Palermo chugged out of the Sicilian hill town of Zucco-Montelepre one night last week, four masked men emerged from the shadows and hopped aboard the mail car. Guns drawn, they warned the lone mail clerk not to move or they would kill him. Ripping open mail sacks, they collected $19,000, then jumped from the train, leaving the clerk trussed up on the floor. The stationmaster back in Zucco-Montelepre's rickety railroad station, which is eerily lit by flickering oil lamps, allowed as how he had seen the men before the holdup, might have been able to identify them "if only we had had electricity."

Charity Begins. ... To Sicilians, the connection between frontier-style crime and economic backwardness is more than a mere alibi. In an era when the downtrodden of Asia, Latin America and Africa make more drastic claims on the world's sympathy, Sicily, the home of one of Europe's oldest civilizations, gets scant foreign attention. But of Sicily's 4,700,000 people, 900,000 are officially classed as totally destitute, 1,200,000 more "semi-destitute." In Palermo, a recent neighborhood survey found 498 people (74 of them infants) crowded into 118 rooms. There was only one toilet in the whole area. In the villages, life is no better. In Palma di Montechiaro in western Sicily, 65% of the inhabitants are illiterate, live mainly in shacks or caves.

Out of such poverty and 2,000 years of rule from the outside has emerged a society utterly contemptuous of formal law. One area of Sicily recently tallied up 520 murders, two-thirds still unsolved. Many were blamed on the Mafia, "the honorable society" that originally functioned as a kind of resistance movement to government by foreigners. Though the Mafia runs a kind of crude kangaroo legal system—which is often preferred by the peasants to the caprices of a distrusted judge—much of Sicily's violence is as simple and stark as passion and avarice. For dispensing its brand of justice, the Mafia is handsomely paid. In Licata, probably Italy's most debt-ridden town, Mafia usurers charge interest as high as 120% monthly.

The White Hope. In Giuseppe di Lampedusa's bestselling novel The Leopard, a character remarks: "In Sicily it doesn't matter about doing things well or badly. The sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of 'doing' at all." Danilo Dolci, the erratic but militant Italian reformer who settled in Partinico and runs a series of private settlement houses for slum dwellers that have stirred Italy's conscience, believes that Sicily should import a team of U.S.-trained sociologists to study the roots of Sicily's distress so that economic aid might be made more effective. Most of Sicily's own spokesmen simply call for that standard 20th century nostrum: rapid industrial development of the island.