by Behan, Tom
So Peppino decided that revolutionaries should stand on their own platform. In 1976 he was a candidate in regional elections for a revolutionary party called Lotta Continua (Continuous Struggle), obtaining 4 per cent of the vote and the highest number of personal preference votes out of all candidates – 350.
One of the reasons he was so successful was that he had become a very popular public speaker. Sometimes up to a thousand people came to Peppino’s campaign speeches, an incredible number in a town of around ten thousand people. As Piero Impastato says, people came to listen not just because he had a good style of speaking: ‘Many people used to come to hear his speeches, even right wingers and Mafiosi, who would either listen or blow raspberries. The real reason though was that Peppino named names – both politicians and Mafiosi. If you stop and think, though, this was the early 1970s – how did he manage to do that?’ It took a lot of courage to stand up against the political and criminal establishment of the town, but Peppino did it. Another member of his group, Pino Manzella, concurs: ‘Loads of people came to hear Peppino speak. People were curious to hear what names he named. And the way he used to talk was like a bulldozer.’
But Peppino and the others were not interested in becoming dull and unimaginative local politicians. While a few of them stood in elections, they still wanted to create an active campaigning group. The idea they developed was to appeal to young people on a cultural level primarily, rather than concentrate immediately on ideology.
No Sex, No Drugs, Some Rock ’n’ Roll
It was the ‘Summer of Love’ in 1967; people were going to San Francisco and wearing flowers in their hair. But in towns like Cinisi it was still winter. Girls couldn’t go out unaccompanied and had to wear sensible clothes, young men wore jackets and ties and cut their hair short. Felicetta Vitale looks back at the difficulties young people had back then:
It was very difficult for boys and girls to meet, you used to have go somewhere where nobody could see you because you couldn’t meet up publicly. For a boy and girl to be seen together in public, talking together on the Corso was seen as a provocation by their parents.
So you’d get criticised at home – sometimes they would stop you from going out in the evenings – obviously this only happened to girls, not boys. And to avoid these problems you had to meet up in the back streets. One of the favourite places was behind the church, because not many people lived round there.
Traditional Catholicism was strong. In most Italian schools religious education was taught by priests, and to prepare for their first communion and confirmation most Italian children had to go to Sunday school. Entertainment and holidays were often run by the Church, local churches organised holiday outings for poor families, run by priests or local volunteers.
Many towns also had a cinema run by the Church. The sequence in the film Cinema Paradiso, set in the Sicily of the 1950s, where the young film operator Salvatore discovers all the scenes censored by the priest from classic films, was very close to reality. Growing up as a boy in Terrasini in the 1950s, Salvo Vitale recalls: ‘I can remember going to church once and seeing the priest with a list of films, categorised as “for everyone”, “for adults” and “banned”. And priests would openly tell you which films you were and weren’t allowed to see. I clearly remember one Neapolitan film, Core ’ngrato, was banned because there was a kiss in it.’ Some young Italians who had grown up in the 1970s only realised that there was a dance scene between Olivia Newton John and John Travolta at the end of Grease when they watched it on television many years later, because priests cut the scene due to the ‘provocative’ clothing and behaviour.
For decades there had been no serious challenge to the Church’s self-appointed role of guardian of public morals. For example, in 1951 there were 48 marriages performed with a religious ceremony in Cinisi and just six without; in 1974 there were 64 religious ceremonies and just two civil ceremonies.
Individuals such as Peppino Impastato were not just breaking from the Mafia, they were also challenging these restrictive traditions. So another revolutionary input from this young group of activists, as Pino Manzella recalls, was trying to date girls in a ‘modern’ way. The tradition that dominated at that time was that girls only went out in public if they were escorted by relatives. For a boy and a girl to go out together, the boy needed to ask permission from her parents. Peppino, Pino and others started actively to disobey this unwritten rule, and although they weren’t spectacularly successful, discovered that many girls looked upon their efforts with sympathy. So although ‘the Summer of Love’ never arrived in Cinisi, by the late 1960s winter was turning to spring.
One of the collective moments when many of these rules were disobeyed was during the period of Carnival, in midFebruary. For a few days Cinisi would be ‘turned upside down’ and normal conventions abandoned, particularly those stopping men from mixing with women. People would dress up in costumes, open their front doors to strangers and allow people to dance together. Confetti would be thrown around the street, and some people would drink a lot. On one memorable occasion the wife of the actor Gaspare Cucinella came out on her balcony and yelled at her drunken husband to come home. His provocative response was almost a complaint: ‘If it wasn’t for you, I would be full of alcohol and syphilis.’ Not that all conventions disappeared at Carnival: women still had to be ‘protected’ by men. If they were to go into the houses of strangers and dance they had to be masked, and there had to be an unmasked man to escort them who would knock at the door of a house, and if his voice was recognised the door would be opened.
Reality would sometimes intrude on people’s enjoyment. Gaspare Cucinella recalled what happened one year: Gaetano Badalamenti couldn’t stand the sight of me because I always took the mickey out of him. One evening during Carnival, when people used to go from one house to another, dancing and so on, I was walking down the Corso with my wife and he was coming up it with his. And he said to me: ‘get out of my way and let me through’. I just answered: ‘why don’t you get out of my way?’ We could have stayed there the whole night, but he moved out of way. Why did he do this? One of my uncles was a friend of his, so he didn’t want to offend him.
These were the moments when extrovert and imaginative people such as Gaspare Cucinella became close to Peppino, who once wrote a bittersweet poem about Carnival:
Today we throw our masks off
By masking ourselves.
Carnival is a very strange festival:
Hypocrisy is defeated
By making a masked monument to it.
Tonight I want to cut up all of my feelings Into a thousand coloured confetti.
Then I will throw them at the throng of revellers To brighten up their dancing.
Along with new ideas, new technologies were starting to circulate. In Partinico, Giuseppe Nobile recalls: ‘In 1975 the first person ever talked to me about videotapes – it was Peppino – at the time I didn’t even know what they were!’ Although widespread use of videos was still several years off, Peppino showed video footage several times when he stood as a candidate in spring 1976.
In a practical sense, Peppino’s cultural horizons were broadened by what was happening in nearby Terrasini. Starting in autumn 1974, for the next two years young people ran an experimental but popular theatre group, having created a stage of 40 square metres and an auditorium of 150 seats within a larger public building. This same group then launched a series of weekly alternative film showings in early 1975, which were always followed by a public debate. Peppino came and took part in nearly all of them.
This experience encouraged him to set up the Music and Culture Club in Cinisi in 1976. The core of this group was between 10 and 15 people, and they organised film shows, concerts, theatre activities, photographic exhibitions. The most popular events were the film shows: the meeting room would fill with up to 100 people. One of the reasons it was popular was because it was a place where young men and women could socialise. Two young people who met
at Music and Culture were Peppino’s younger brother Giovanni and Felicetta Vitale. A small but very determined woman, she and Giovanni would act as a team in all their battles over the coming decades:
I really got involved with politics through Music and Culture, and with the feminist collective that grew up within it. So I took part in meetings, debates and so on. And Peppino always encouraged us women to get active and start speaking in public; Fanny Vitale, Pino Manzella’s wife, was the first one to speak at a rally.
We moved on to debates with women’s groups that came from Palermo. What we really wanted was that ordinary people – housewives – came and discussed women’s issues, such as abortion and divorce. We had a very direct approach: ‘come on, get involved!’ There was a big debate within the group about how to approach people, and I for one felt that if you related to people aggressively you would alienate them. I disagreed with the idea of saying: ‘we don’t want anything to do with men, our problems are our own’. I wanted for men to feel that these were their problems too, that these issues were shared.
But we did make some headway locally, even though feminists were generally not looked upon positively – and this included my parents as well.
Margherita Galati was 16 or 17 at the time, and has similar memories of what the club meant for her, and how the older generation tried to stop her from taking part:
My elder brother suggested I start going to Music and Culture because they used to show films there. And I must say, it was thanks to Peppino I began to understand the reality of the town I lived in and to keep my distance from certain kinds of people.
We used to get pressured at home by our families, though. They’d say to us: ‘you shouldn’t go there, it’s a place of perdition. You’ll end up being prostitutes, you’ll totally lose your way.’ My mother used to lose her temper and pull me by the hair, banging my head against the wall – so my reaction was to keep on going there.
The growth of a feminist group was something Peppino was very proud about. In fact, he used to boast to his male friends that feminists had knitted a jumper for him.
In any event Music and Culture filled a yawning gap for young people tired of traditional family life and the eternal immobility of peasant culture. Such was its success that the Communist Party, now worried about a sizeable young left-wing opposition that had rooted itself in the town, unsuccessfully tried to gain control over it.
The Impastatos: A Family at War
Peppino’s activities ratcheted up the tension in the Impastato household. His mother Felicia recounts the reaction of his angry father: ‘I wanted to run away . . . when my husband rang the door bell I used to run into the bathroom. There were always arguments because they used to come and tell him: “hey, your son has just made a speech, he had a go at the Mafia”.’ Luigi used to tell his wife: ‘ “he can talk about anything, all the other parties, the fascists . . . but he absolutely can’t talk about the Mafia” – you couldn’t touch the Mafia, it was untouchable.’ Felicia tried to hold Peppino back: ‘I used to tell Peppino to watch what he was doing – “Be careful”, and he used to answer – “people and kids need to be told what the Mafia is”.’ If the Mafia was meant to be untouchable, then Peppino was unstoppable.
Looking back many years later Peppino’s mother recognised that the best thing she could have done was to leave her husband. Yet back in those days this was far easier said than done, particularly for a woman of her generation: ‘Who would have helped me?’ she wondered, rightly raising the prospect of being a social outcast if she left her husband. The cultural set-up back then was that as a mother and wife Felicia had duties on both levels, she belonged to others and could not make a decision independently of them, especially one that would destroy the conventional family structure.
Despite all of this, Felicia was a very modern woman. Another woman who was fast becoming a fixture in the household – Giovanni’s girlfriend Felicetta – was surprised at the openness of this woman forty years her senior:
When I first started coming to this house what struck me was that she read a lot of newspapers – there were always five or six on the table – which Peppino had bought. Given that she was on her own a lot she would read them as well. Giovanni was off working with his father, whereas Peppino was upstairs studying. Then he would come downstairs and leave the papers on the table.
Felicia was old-fashioned and modern at the same time. I think she got a lot of this from Peppino, whereas Peppino got his character from her – strong and decisive. He also got his subtle irony from her too.
By now it wasn’t just Peppino’s newspaper articles and speeches that were annoying the Mafia. He would frequently make very precise accusations about the links between Mafiosi and local politicians – clearly somebody was giving him inside information. It’s never been clear who passed these details over to him. Pino Vitale, another campaigner in the same group thinks: ‘it could have been a cousin – Stefano Impastato – who was mayor for a while. He didn’t agree with his other Christian Democrat councillors, so he might have had a reason to give him information. But Peppino never revealed who his informant was, because if it became known then the source would have dried up.’ Another definite source were the anonymous letters he often received.
Much of this activity was often just background noise for Peppino’s father. But, as Felicia says: ‘Sometimes things were calm at home. But during election campaigns arguments used to break out.’ Locally Peppino was growing in stature; some people might still disagree with him, but many others now listened to what he said. This was a worry for politicians concerned that their Mafia links might be made public. And all of this got back to her husband Luigi: ‘As soon as he heard that Peppino and his friends were organising a meeting he got angry,’ but this wasn’t just because of what his eldest son was doing: ‘he wanted Giovanni to keep his distance from Peppino. But I’d tell him: “Giovanni should go with this brother, he should be by his side.” That’s what I wanted.’ Luigi wanted the opposite, for Peppino to work in his shop, alongside his brother Giovanni, in the hope of keeping him out of trouble – but Peppino wasn’t interested.
Giovanni was starting to identify with his elder brother: ‘We always felt that my father had made a choice to become a slave to the power of the Mafia – our choices were liberation and democracy.’ But Peppino was far beyond Giovanni’s position and this created problems between them, as he openly admits:
I was younger and I was afraid. I didn’t agree with his method of clashing with the Mafia head-on. But in some ways I was jealous of him, also because for good or bad all attention was focused on him. So automatically I was excluded, almost ignored, and this was a burden for me. We used to argue frequently, and sometimes we even came to blows.
Sometimes family tensions exploded in public, such as the evening that a new open-air pizzeria was opened at the side of the Impastato family shop, when a group of Peppino’s friends decided to play some music to celebrate. One of them, Giovanni Riccobono, remembers: ‘I was operating the lights. Something must have happened between him and Giovanni, because at a certain point Peppino starting grabbing bottles and throwing them in the bushes.’ Salvo Vitale, who was playing bass guitar, adds, ‘Then he stormed off in a foul mood. I never found out why.’
Not only was Giovanni trying to deal with an older and highly strung brother, but, as he said, there was also the fear that arose from his awareness of the Mafia’s power: ‘Mafiosi used to go regularly to council meetings to check on what was happening. They would often go to Christian Democrat public meetings too.’ Naturally they didn’t take part in the debate, they just wanted everyone to see that they were there, keeping an eye on everyone. Because Giovanni wasn’t rushing around writing leaflets, organising meetings and giving speeches, he had more time to observe what was going on. He was largely outside the intensely political atmosphere of Peppino’s group, and perhaps he could gauge the opinions of ordinary local people better, who after all were hi
s customers day after day at the family shop.
Giovanni used to see policemen and Mafiosi: ‘walking down the street together as friends. They often went into a bar for a coffee together. There was a carabiniere colonel in Terrasini, Lombardo, who was always hanging around with them. You used to see this all over town, a very direct relationship between the Mafia and the police.’ The strength of the Mafia doesn’t just lie in their ability to kill people; if they can create a situation where they also control the police and politicians then people lose all hope in democracy and justice, and just become more and more scared.
Even though Felicia agreed with Peppino’s stance, she was getting increasingly worried: ‘I used to say to him – “you’re a dead man. Don’t keep making trouble.” I often went upstairs to his room and jumbled everything up, creating a big mess.’ All this tension even produced a chink of humanity in her husband, who told her: ‘Get him to stop. Tell him to stop. He’s digging his own grave, that’s what he’s doing.’ He only said this to her alone, at night, so as not to lose face in front of his children. The possibility of actually losing his son had occurred to him, and for the first time he started to grapple with his conflicting loyalties towards his son and his Mafia friends.