The Real Reason for Sicily's Woes
The Law is NOT equal for All
So where did it all go wrong for Sicily? Why was Sicily in the reign of Frederick II, from 1198–1250, the most wonderful place on earth, its monarch acclaimed as stupor mundi and the first truly modern ruler, only for it to decline so precipitously to become today the problem child of the Italian Republic? How is it that the once fabled land, though still very beautiful, is now famous for squalor and poverty, inefficiency and crime? I once talked this over with a friend of mine: she was a historian, and a reasoned and moderate person, and the topic kept us busy all the way in the car from Catania airport to Enna.
The poverty of Sicily has nothing to do with the poverty of the land, which is fertile, and which has been the basis of Sicilian wealth in the time of the Romans, when Sicily was famous for its agricultural products, especially wheat. Not only is the land fertile, it is well managed, and produces the sort of things that people want, namely citrus fruits and wine, which must be profitable.
Perhaps the poverty of Sicily has something to do with the social structures of the island. Well into the 20th century land ownership was restricted to a very small elite group, the aristocracy, who were frequently absent, as was the case in John Bull’s other island, Ireland. It is also the case that industrialisation came late to Sicily or not at all, though it has to be said that there were enterprises like the salt industry that date back centuries. But it is true to say that the industrial revolution that transformed places like Milan and Turin did not touch Sicily in the same way.
Sicily does not suffer from poverty of infrastructure; there are roads and bridges and railways just as there are everywhere else in Italy; despite the Messina Bridge remaining on the drawing board for years, there has been lots of government spending on the autostrade, for example, which are excellent.
Is the poverty of Sicily the fault of the people? Some northern Italians would like to think so. They work very hard, and they attribute the less motivated approach of the Sicilians to the climate. This is nonsense of the first order. A very successful city like Milan has the most atrocious climate in Europe: colder than Copenhagen in winter, hotter than Malta in summer. The entire plain of northern Italy is either freezing or boiling; Sicily, by contrast is very pleasant most of the year round. One cannot blame the weather.
In the end, on that car trip, we decided that the woes of modern Sicily are caused by one thing alone: bad government. Sicilians may well have seen their governments as foreign for the last eight hundred years or so, and it is true that Sicily has typically been ruled by viceroys standing in for absent kings. Even after Italian unity, the rulers from the north must have seemed even more distant that the former rulers from Naples. When your government is perceived as foreign, co-operating with it is not so easy. But this in recent times has been more a matter of perception, than one of fact. Sicily has given united Italy several Prime Ministers, such as Francesco Crispi (1887 –1891 and 1893-1896) and and Mario Scelba (1954-1955). The current President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, is Sicilian; and the current Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni has a Sicilian mother. Moreover, the Sicilian vote was decisive in keeping the Christian Democrats in power for so long. The current government too has strong backing from the island. It is strange that Sicily keeps on voting for the people who govern it so badly.
Perhaps bad government could be better understood as endemic corruption and inefficiency. Again this is a matter of perception, but perceptions do count for a great deal; but it is also a matter of fact. The Italian postal service has long been regarded as not fit for purpose; the same is true of the national carrier Alitalia which has been bailed out by the government time and time again. But the trains run on time, thanks to You Know Who. Yet these same problems also afflict Milan and Turin and Venice, and they are very different places.
The real problem of Sicily is that it is a place, unlike Lombardy, the Veneto, Piedmont, Emilia Romagna, Umbria and Tuscany, where private enterprise does not flourish. The chief strength of the Italian economy lies in all those small to medium family firms, some of which have grown to be household names: Gucci, Fendi, Benetton, Olivetti, Ferragamo and so on. None of these have emerged from Sicily. Why not?
If Sicily is a hostile environment for private enterprise, if it suffers under the dead hand of a sluggish administration, then the third component in Sicily’s woes is the perception that the Mafia is everywhere, profiting from the people’s lack of trust in institutions, and sucking the blood out of business. The Mafia has been compared to an octopus, with far-reaching tentacles, but it is best understood as an enterprise that, thanks to its illegitimate advantages, overshadows and deprives of sunlight every legitimate enterprise. The Mafia has the competitive edge. Any other business is doomed to languish.
When Italians say, as they often do, that the Mafia does not exist, they are to some extent right. The secret society with its initiation rites and secret meetings is not the real problem. The real problem for Sicily and similar places is that you cannot get anything done unless you know someone, that things like building permits and government patronage are given to those who matter, and not to those who don’t; that, in short, there are two classes of citizens: the friends, and those on the outside. The Law is Equal for All, it says in every court room in Italy. But it is not. There’s us, and there is them.
Funnily enough this sense of the Us versus Them works both ways. The Mafia see themselves as the underdogs, the victims of the oppressive state, at war with the lords of misrule in Rome, standing up for local rights; those who are not in the Mafia see themselves as the excluded ones.
The solution to all this lies in making the law truly equal for all. Presumably this is what was the case in the golden age of Frederick II. The Italian state is well on the way to making the law more effective, by closing loopholes and by making the criminal justice system more agile in its persecution of organised crime. But there is still a long way to go. The Italian legal system remains cumbersome and slow, and, as the example of Silvio Berlusconi has shown, even when you are accused of serious crimes, you can spin out the process and wait for the statute of limitations to save you. The Law is not Equal for All. That is why the Mafia can flourish: the law is not agile enough to catch them, and people, frustrated by the law’s delay turn to the Mafia for help. Frederick II, stupor mundi, would have been horrified.