&gt; if he did or not something nobody was ever able to prove it.The court of cassation disagrees. And he wasn&#x27;t condemned only because of statute of limitations.

I&#x27;m really interested to hear this. That book makes the assertion otherwise, but I definitely am not an expert. I know very little of Italian politics, honestly, and need to read more about Andreotti given what you said. Thank you.

Regarding Berlusconi from a far, I thought &quot;Thank god nothing like that could happen here (USA).&quot;Ahem.There are so many obvious parallels between Berlusconi and one of own, I can&#x27;t fathom why it hasn&#x27;t been discussed.(Maybe it has; I mostly tuned out our kayfabe for my mental health.)

Without having to go that far in the past, there are many evidences that Berlusconi had deep connection with mafia. Instead for Andreotti there are no evidence nor proofs, Andreotti was a very intelligent man and if he did or not something nobody was ever able to prove it.

One of my favorite books is Excellent Cadavers. It&#x27;s about two Italian judges that systematically root out corruption in Sicily, and pay for it with their lives. It is an incredible history of the path of fascism to the modern day Mafia. And the most interesting thing for me was how connected the Mafia are to the top levels of Italian government. Andreotti was definitely complicit.

My favorite part about Italy is how most sought for mafia bosses are &quot;hiding&quot; for their entire lives in their home regions and villages. The degree of &quot;ignoring the obvious&quot; is only comparable with the worst religious extremist, but also every country has is own equivalent of &quot;ignoring the obvious&quot;.

I agree with your analysis but Greek weren&#x27;t merely conqueror, they are part of Sicily because they established themselves there and remained. Large part of Catania and Syracuse are of Greek ascent.About the arable land, I don&#x27;t know, Sicily is extremely fertile in general and there also some large plains as well like in Palermo. Sicily was extremely rich and prosper during the Normad period and for the Arabs who came before it was nothing short than a paradise.

The South being considered an actual part of Italy is a pretty new concept and not completely accepted by either the south or the north.The north is sophisticated, cosmopolitan, industrialized, and has tons of arable farmland and just generally money running through it. Culturally it&#x27;s more French &#x2F; white European.The south has very little arable land, it is rocky and hilly. It does not lend itself well to large-scale agriculture. It was largely ruled in a feudal system for a very very long time, which then collapsed into the peasant families each being given land ownership of plots too small to sustain a family.It has also been a target of conquering by Greeks, Ottoman Turks, and many many many more cultures due to its critical location for shipping lanes - so it&#x27;s been sort &quot;ran over&quot; too many times to count.The fact that the real power structure has turned over so many times has led to lots of very very localized, unofficial power structures that represent sort of local &quot;fiefdoms&quot; which exist outside of the modern governmental structures.
Subsequently, it has built its own mythology of being &quot;unconquerable&quot; or &quot;ungovernable&quot; and not really a part of &quot;Italy&quot; - where &quot;Italy&quot; is seen as an outside power which builds into the mythology that helps the mafioso gain and retain control.Edit: for very enjoyable (and highly regarded) novel that gets at the mafioso &#x2F; Southern mythology about this, I highly recommend Black Souls.

Spain does not have any mafia-like structures. Modern mafia emerged in Sicily long after Spain (actually Aragon) were gone, probably because of many different factors.One should not forget the Kingdom of Two Sicilies was quite wealthy and advanced at the time of the Italian Reunification, but crumbled shortly afterwards.There was a big wealth transfer South to North. Nonetheless, it&#x27;s still a lovely place.

I am from Sicily, near Palermo. In my humble opinion the main reason of emergency of Mafia was injustice and bad government, most prominently from Bourbon family but also from previous kingdoms. When there is injustice and bad government you learn to despise the authorities and the laws and your priority is the survival.Sicily was great when it was governed by the Normands but that didn&#x27;t last for a long time.I live now in Switzerland and I am studying its history. It seems one of the reason of Switzerland prosperity and order was they never got a prince or a king but cities were autonomously governing themselves.

A different take from a non-Italian. I&#x27;m curious what actual Italians think of this:I&#x27;m reading a book on how Spain gained and lost a world empire (I&#x27;d had it on my shelf forever and never read it):<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Empire-Spain-Became-World-1492-1763&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0060194766&#x2F;ref=sr_1_1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Empire-Spain-Became-World-1492-1763&#x2F;d...</a>It said that many northern Italians believe that a big reason the Mafia is so dominant in southern Italy and Sicily is that it was ruled (loosely) by Spain a long time ago. True?

Part of it is that the shelf life of a mob boss is not expected to be very long. You&#x27;ve got to get what you can, while you can.

It seems like Sicily is an experiment in what happens when you let a few thousand people intimidate the rest of society into letting them cut in line and cheat on a grand scale. I bet the average person&#x27;s cost of living and taxes are probably at least 5% higher than they otherwise would be as a result of extortion fees, cleanup costs from illegal dumping, VAT fraud, cartel&#x2F;monopolistic behavior, etc.

Both in Palermo and in Naples, the business activities of the mafia can be categorized as extremely short-sighted profit squeezing, which I suppose is all you might expect from organizations operating mostly outside the law but with a firm grip on their respective societies (a bit like Google&#x2F;Meta&#x2F;Tesla I suppose).

Unpopular but, the south of italy is a middle eastern country, in all metrics.

&gt; but it’s not the kind of social housing we might hope for—it’s mostly slum-like.It may be not what we hope for, but isn&#x27;t it pretty much the same as what happens when the government builds it? I mean, the &quot;projects&quot; aren&#x27;t exactly the shining example of what &quot;we might hope for&quot; either. It looks like this way of solving the problem is bound to fail whoever tries it - be it the well-intentioned government or the mafia.

&gt;&gt; it’s not the kind of social housing we might hope for—it’s mostly slum-likeIf the alternative to slums is tent cities, I hope for slums.

I recommend visiting the Ecomuseo in Palermo [1] if you ever have the chance. They examine, among other things, the lasting impact of the subpar building of now mostly crumbling structures by the Mafia that still litter the cities of Sicily.Yes, the mafia built housing, but it’s not the kind of social housing we might hope for—it’s mostly slum-like. Of course, the city of Palermo is also EXTREMELY densely populated—I read something like the fourth-most densely populated city in Europe in a magazine once, but can’t source that now, so take it with a grain of salt.Nota bene: I’m not Italian myself; my wife’s family has their roots in Sicily.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.marememoriaviva.it&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.marememoriaviva.it&#x2F;</a> (website only (?) in Italian)

&gt;It&#x27;s like saying &quot;oh, the local feudal Lord helps us fight bandits!&quot;Well, the whole point of the Mafia is that it&#x27;s a sort of reactionary movement to defeudalisation&#x2F;uniformisation in places that are far away from where the power centralizes (the exact same reason why Yakuza started after the unification and why a lot of gangsters are from Kyushu).It also pisses me off that people use the word mafia inappropriately, for example &quot;Russian Mafia&quot; or &quot;Moroccan Mafia&quot; have no meaning, these are not feudal organization like Mafia or Yakuza

He also might be a upstart bandit in the first place. Such nobleness of mind and character. Gods chosen!

&gt; It&#x27;s like saying &quot;oh, the local feudal Lord helps us fight bandits!&quot;It&#x27;s not exactly the same, because&gt; - yeah, but he can also cut you down in the street without due process, doesn&#x27;t care about your opinion, and might enforce ius primae noctis, without any recourse.If the mafioso goes too far they lose the support of the locals.I mean, sure, the population has no recourse when some henchman rapes some bride, but the organisation&#x27;s management usually enforce their rules on their own members rigourously and violently, too.In the case of losing what little support they have with no profit involved, it&#x27;s not hard to see why these organisations don&#x27;t actually allow Droit De Signeur.They&#x27;re a business, first and foremost. Allow, even encourage, violence to increase profits? Sure! Use violence just for kicks? Probably not.

So, like every goverment, then. &quot;The government always enjoyed some support among people who benefit from it, which is why they make this sort of populist move in the first place.&quot; Yes, checks out.

At this point I&#x27;d take the feudal Lord a hundred times over any democracy, at least the feudal lord had the obligation to provide housing and a piece of land for his people&#x2F;peasants, unlike democracy, which by this point is just an empty concept used to keep the current hegemonic system in place (and I could understand how come what they call democracy is still popular in places like this one here, places where people don&#x27;t have to worry all that much about mortgages&#x2F;paying rent)

The Mafia always enjoyed some support among people who benefit from it, which is why they make this sort of populist move in the first place. That doesn&#x27;t mean they are as legitimate as a proper democratic government.It&#x27;s like saying &quot;oh, the local feudal Lord helps us fight bandits!&quot; - yeah, but he can also cut you down in the street without due process, doesn&#x27;t care about your opinion, and might enforce ius primae noctis, without any recourse.

&gt; I’d be interested to hear the viewpoints of Sicilians on this onethat&#x27;s a big part of TFA, here&#x27;s an excerpt:The Sack of Palermo did not happen because a criminal organization imposed it from the outside though the use of violence. It was, rather, a chosen, planned and enacted project involving most of the Palermo elite of professionals, entrepreneurs and politicians, cheered on by a new middle class looking to climb the social ladder, and accepted by the underclasses in need of jobs and housing.

No snark intended below:I&#x27;m genuinely curious what the difference is according to you.From where I&#x27;m standing I sometimes struggle to see the difference between my government and a mafia. They behave in uncanny similar ways.

It&#x27;s just like you have no idea how mafias operate.Cheap affordable housing from a government is absolutely not the same as cheap affordable housing from a criminal organisation.

Lets see how that worked out for turkey. Oh, can i have syrup on those pancakes when the earth shakes. Mafia shit never works. Its tofudreg construction - in the midst of europe.Railway stations with no rails going in.

It&#x27;s also falling apart, literally. I have been in Sicily and modern buildings, highways and bridges are in really bad shape due to faulty concrete. Closed roads and buildings wrapped in scaffolding everywhere.

Oh no, they built tons of cheap affordable housing. How terrible of them!I’d be interested to hear the viewpoints of Sicilians on this one

The construction of the mafioso social capital and the Sack of Palermo (2023)