Sicily tours spotlight brave fight against the Mafia

A Pax Mafiosa has settled over Sicily.

Sicilians are defying the Mafia in a movement fueled by the generation that came of age in the 1980s, when waves of bloody public assassinations of prosecutors, police and a priest paralyzed the island.

And now, in and around Sicily's main city of Palermo, guides from Addiopizzo, a group of young activists, show tourists vivid evidence of Cosa Nostra's brutal stranglehold and the new resistance.

Addiopizzo ("Goodbye Pizzo") was started in 2004 by a handful of college grads who wanted to open a bar and realized they would have to pay pizzo to the rackets -- protection money that 80% of business owners allegedly still pay today to avoid Mafia harassment. Instead, they brazenly plastered Palermo with in-your-face stickers declaring: "A people that pays pizzo is a people without dignity".

For local merchants, fighting pizzo is key. "By paying the pizzo, shopkeepers accept the Mafia's authority and sovereignty over their area," says Edoardo Zuffato, a cofounder of Addiopizzo. Today, over 800 shops are members of Addiopizzo, displaying window decals declaring they won't knuckle under, and over 10,000 citizens of Palermo have agreed not to shop where pizzo is paid. While pizzo accounts for only 3% of the Mafia's annual take, it has been a dependable source of cash flow.

Planning our trip to Sicily, my husband Dave and I read online about their unusual tours -- walking tours of Palermo offered every Saturday and on request, and private tours an hour away to Corleone, home of the notorious Riina and Provenzano families. We chose the walking tour as a great introduction to Sicily today, and a valuable balance to our visits to the ancient Greek, Roman and Norman monuments of the island's 9,000 years of history.

We met our young guide Flavia Arato at one Palermo's most famous restaurants, Antica Focacceria San Francesco, named for the medieval church across the piazza. Once, it was a hangout of notorious Mafia boss Lucky Luciano. Today, owner Fabio Conticello, a prominent Palermitan, displays his Addiopizzo window decal. He was among the first to defy the Mafia, after having endured harassment that included the usual first step, Super Glue in the door locks -- then vandalism to customers' cars and sabotage in his kitchen by Mafiosi he had been forced to hire. When Conticello went to the police and later faced down the Mafia at a trial, Addiopizzo stood with him, as they have for about 130 others over the last decade.

As Flavia began our tour by filling us in on Mafia history, we ate an assortment of the Sicilian street foods Antica Focacceria is famous for -- arancini (fried rice balls), panelle (chickpea fritters), cazilli (potato fritters) and eggplant roulade, though we passed on its hugely popular pane de la milza, a veal spleen sandwich dished out to a line of lunch customers. We topped off our snacks with dreamy cannoli for dessert, all included in the 30 euro walking tour price (about $33).

After lunch, we wended our way for another three hours through the medieval streets and markets of chaotic Palermo, keeping up a lively conversation with Flavia, whose passion for her city and her cause was exhilarating.

As we headed up Palermo's hill away from its harbor, the story of the Mafia's grip unfolded.

Passing a pile of concrete, not much more than chunks -- still inhabited by squatters even after the house was destroyed 72 years ago by Allied bombs -- we learned that Sicily's postwar politicians handed construction over to the Mafia, leaving it to their discretion what should be rebuilt and how. The result: vast fortunes for the Mafia and a vast landscape of shoddy, ugly buildings, a chief annoyance to Palermo's young professionals who now spearhead the resistance.

We passed a small coffee shop owned by another early Addiopizzo merchant, Lucio Gionti, who inspired others by tossing out onto the street the slot machine the Mafia had installed in his shop. I asked him whether his stand has brought him trouble. He smiled and shrugged and said no. He said the Addiopizzo window decal tells customers he is "a good man." Another shopowner, folding shirts when I popped in after seeing an Addiopizzo decal on her door, seemed completely at ease discussing it: "Good for me, for the community and humanity", she told me.

The Mafia is said to believe that bothering Addiopizzo shopowners would be a net negative -- the bad publicity and increased police scrutiny worse than the lost pizzo money. It wasn't always true. In 2007, Salvatore Lo Piccolo, sometimes called the Boss of All Bosses, torched a paint warehouse whose owner had refused many pizzo demands. The Boss and his henchmen are in jail, and the state replaced the factory.

Just a block further up the main street, we reached Palermo's 12th-century Norman cathedral, built on the site where a mosque once stood in the 9th century, after the invasion by Arabs from nearby North Africa. Flavia pointed across the cathedral's piazza to an enormous pink wooden boat, a float that sits there all year until it is drawn through the streets on Santa Rosalia Day, the largest celebration in Palermo, for its patron saint. In 2012, Addiopizzo members paraded alongside the float to huge applause, which was taken as a sign of wide public support and legitimacy. The organization had become more than a small movement by young middle-class professionals.

At the cathedral, we discussed the complicated relationship between the Cosa Nostra and the Church. During the Cold War, they were united against Communism. Some priests have been Mafiosi. The very public 1992 massacres of the crusading anti-Mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, their family members and bodyguards, were a true turning point, not just among the people of Sicily but also with the Church. A year later, crusading priest Guiseppe Puglisi, beatified recently by Pope Francis, was murdered at his church. Soon after that, Pope John Paul became the first Pope to speak out against the Mafia when he went to Sicily to declare that Mafiosi must repent. Since then, Mafia murders have been only among mob families, though police did uncover a plot just last year against a prosecutor who was targeting Cosa Nostra.

Just beyond the cathedral, we entered a narrow alley where Sicily's famous brightly painted wooden carts are kept. Flavia pointed to black-cloaked, haunting figures on one cart, the iconic medieval secret sect called Beati Paoli. The Beati Paoli enforcers ruled Palermo, administering a court that exacted revenge on the nobility. The Mafia has embraced that legend, calling those defenders of the poor the ancestors of Cosa Nostra.

That narrow lane opened into one of Palermo's famous street markets, the Capo. As we threaded between stalls spilling mounds of artichokes and tomatoes and fennel on one side, and tubs of squid and every variety of colorful mollusks on the opposite, Flavia told us that the vendors are shaken down for protection money under the guise of fake lottery games -- games with no winner.

We soon reached our final stop, just off the Capo: Palermo's official anti-Mafia statement in concrete, a long plaza in front of the courts building. The Piazza of Memory has eleven columns, each memorializing one of the prosecutors or judges blown to bits over the years. ("Ask a ten-year-old child, even Mafia children, and they will recite all eleven," a Sicilian historian later told me.) We sat there on a marble bench with Flavia, and summed up all we had learned about Sicily's bloody past, and today's gutsy resistance.