‘The Mafia only Kills in Summer’ is an Italian comedy drama set in Palermo in the later 1970’s which blends fact with fiction. I personally could not get on with it, finding the Italian sense of humour not to my taste, but it is freely available on Channel Four, so please judge for yourself. What made me give up on the series was that most of it does not seem to have been filmed in Palermo at all, but in Lazio, and quite a few scenes are recognisably filmed in Rome, which is inexplicable and annoying. I mean, why do that? It must be for financial reasons, but it is a real shame as Rome cannot pass for Palermo.
The title is arresting, and, in a rather grim way, does make sense. The whole of Italy shuts down in summer, it really does; from June to October all academic institutions are shut, and a great many businesses shut in August as well, though, and this took me by surprise, to shut down for a month requires the permission of the vigili urbani, the traffic cops, or used to, when I lived in Rome. Likewise, one had to shut for lunch, and not to do so was illegal. I believe these laws on shop opening times have now been reformed, at least in Italy, but not of course in the Vatican, where the Italian way of doing things still rules.
While it is not true that everyone goes to the beach or the mountains in the hottest month of the year, and certainly not everyone has access to a maison secondaire, a substantial number do, so with a huge proportion of people on leave, everything is sluggish. In addition the heat does not help. So, if you are planning a big murder, summer is the time to do it, as the police may be reduced to a skeleton service, and their energy levels may be sapped by the heat. The same logic also applies to the day of the week you pick for your crime: a Friday early evening, when everyone is looking forward to knocking off for the weekend, must be popular with criminals. Police responses will be much slower in rush hour too. Italian traffic is terrible.
There is another sort of crime in which the Mafia has historically specialised, and that is the terrorist spectacular which is designed to ramp up the ‘strategy of tension’ (strategia di tensione). One famous example was the double bombing of two Rome churches at a few minutes past midnight on Wednesday 28th July 1993, which I have mentioned before now. I was not there at the time, it being the summer holiday, and I am sure the police and the forensic experts (la scientifica, as they are called) must have been severely hacked off to have their own holidays interrupted. That alone would have ratcheted up the tension.
It is not only the weather and the holiday schedule that work in favour of the Mafia; so does the Italian system of government, which is deliberately calibrated to make sure that no one person can amass too much power. Long gone and impossible to recall are the days when Il Duce gave the orders and il prefetto Moro carried them out, and things got done. Now you have rival government ministries, quite probably controlled by rival political parties in the coalition, none of which want to concede the glory of success to another; and you have rival police forces at work too: the Police, the Carabinieri, and most importantly of all the Guardia di Finanza, the financial police. A co-ordinated response to organised crime becomes very difficult in these circumstances. Add in to the mixture the byzantine and very slow processes of Italian justice.
There is another reason too why the Mafia prefer summer for their crimes. In summer many Italians ‘go home’, that is to say, they leave the big cities and go back to the region where their family originates: thus summer sees a major exodus from cities like Turin and Milan, to Sicily and the south in general. With all these people travelling at the same time, it becomes hard to track Mafia operatives making their way across the country to plant bombs. They hide in the crowds. In addition, security is laxer in the summer months, as people are on holiday, and their guard is down. The best place to carry out an assassination is while your victim is dozing on the beach thinking how peaceful things are. But please, do not let this ruin your holidays, particularly if you are going to Italy! Acts of violence in Italy are few and far between, even in summer.