by Peter Robb
She set up house opposite a brothel in the centre of Palermo, helping or hoping to repopulate the dying heart by the force of her example. Orlando’s council now subsidized the costs of people who bought and improved places in the old centre, a stay against the decay and destruction of the mafia decades in city hall. Pippo and Anna Maria of the Sant’Andrea and their two sons and their cats had also given up their spacious building-speculator’s flat in the suburbs to live in a miniscule eyrie, a fifth-floor walk-up with a tiny rooftop terrace, just by the university and looking out on a stupendous church dome. The strangely cavernous space in which I’d been talking to Letizia had once been a parking lot for street-vendors’ carts in the ruins of a burnt-out eighteenth-century house. The ground floor was about to be turned into a pizzeria when she bought it. Now it was the publishing house. Next floor up was her home, and upstairs from that was her dark room and photography studio. It was so dark downstairs by the end of our talk I’d hardly been able to make her out. She’d been talking about making Palermo liveable, and mentioning her team of men, when I’d startled her by asking to join them next morning. She’d said I could, though.
* * *
WAIT TILL you meet my team, she’d said in the dark that late afternoon. I’ve got a handpicked team of council workers. We go out at seven every morning. We go to the most degraded parts of the city. We clean up. Dogshit. Syringes. Everything. And we create green spaces. We civilize. Letizia was no longer in charge of parks and gardens on the council, because her other, grander responsibilities as a member of Sicily’s regional parliament didn’t permit it. I wondered whether Sicilians still called their regional parliamentarians the ninety thieves. Letizia’s first commitment still was the crumbling and degraded heart of her city and she couldn’t help feeling that her successor was a little less au fait with the problems, a little less active in seeking their solution. So they’ve given me, she said, my own intervention squad. Men who share my goals. I’ve got a truck, a car and driver and a team called Letizia Battaglia’s Special Squad. We were now twisting through some fairly unsavoury minor streets of the centre and abruptly emerged into an open space made by the meeting of several oddly-angled streets.
To call this space a piazza would have been grandiose. Nevertheless a part of it was taken up by low bushy trees planted around arrangements of rocks and gravel. It’d been fenced off by an arrangement of rustic sticks and loops of heavy chain, but these were now trampled in many places. A battered council truck was parked nearby, and standing around leaning on rakes, or sitting on the public bench, smoking or muttering or staring into space, all on the maturely corpulent side, most dressed in worker’s blue overalls and few recently shaven, was Letizia’s handpicked urban intervention team. None of them moved as the little white Fiat screeched to a halt, but when Letizia sprang out and cried Breakfast! Coffee! Let’s all go to the bar, boys! the group without seeming to move gathered an almost imperceptible momentum that got it to the nearby bar slash pasticceria in no time at all.
The little park had been an initiative of Letizia’s, a piece of consciousness-raising. A small girl had died of a parental beating in one of the nearby slum houses and the dusty gravelled grove had been made her memorial. There was a plaque with her name set into a stone. The plaque was now discoloured and barely legible, the grove dusty, rubbish-strewn, trampled. Letizia was determined to keep it up, not let the tide of squalor submerge it. While Pietro told me about the dead child, Letizia discussed what to do with members of her team. There was some grumbling. When one of the senior men in a cloth cap and half-unbuttoned overall started to protest, Letiza grabbed him and spun him gaily across the gravel in a waltz. A couple of teenage boys stopped their Vespas and stood straddling their scooters openmouthed and motionless in the roadway, watching the couple dance.
Suddenly the dance stopped. Agreement had been reached. Pietro and I were ordered back into the little white car and we shot off. Our next stop was the botanical garden. Two hundred years earlier, Goethe had thought it the most amazing place in the world. He’d been overcome by the exotic vegetation, and the play of light and colour and the impression of that marvellous garden made him think of Homer. Little this morning recalled Homer. Even Letizia’s exuberance was briefly muted here by decrepitude, scrubbiness and sloth. She lacked clout here now. Once she’d had two thousand gardeners and was Orlando’s head of gardens and urban liveability in Palermo. We transformed the city, she said of those days. Then we were off again, to a hospice for social outcasts run by a burly lay Franciscan who had a ruddy face, a big brown beard and laughing eyes. His eyes shone even brighter when Letizia harangued him. He wore a brown habit and a knit cap and we stood in the dusty sunlight as he and Letizia argued about what to do with a junkie with AIDS who was stealing from the others.
Then we rocketed around the back of the Capuchin graveyard to a neobrutalist primary school, a brand new building in a slum where Letizia knew the teachers. A truck had come the week before and dumped tons of gravel in a yard where plants could have grown. Letizia was furious and swore she’d make them cart it off again. Some minutes later, I was dumped amid the morning traffic outside the Teatro Massimo. Letizia told me she now had to go to work. Her day was just starting. She’d spend a couple of hours on her publishing house, and then be off in mid-morning to one of her committees on the council or the regional parliament. On days when they were in session, she might stay in the chamber till five the next morning. When they weren’t, she’d squeeze in some quality time with her daughters and five grandchildren. It was now barely past breakfast time. I’d have to wait if I wanted to see her photos.
* * *
LETIZIA’S PHOTOS, she’d told me, led her into politics. We used to hold exhibitions in the piazza, in schools. Our horrible pictures stirred up anger and revulsion, they made people talk about what the mafia was doing to Palermo, made them want to resist. Her own interest was less the violence of the men than the lives of women, children, the mad, forced to live with that violence. Politics, power, public life never drew her. I was a photographer because I had to earn a crust and I used my pictures to fight the mafia. I mixed photos of children crying because their father had been killed with others of children crying because they were hungry. I never wanted to take photos of politicians. A photojournalist, though, takes what work comes round. Thus it was that one afternoon in 1979, when she was working for L’Ora, the paper asked her to take Franco Zecchin’s place and cover a political event. The event was also a celebration. Letizia remembered it later as an apotheosis. The prime minister, Giulio Andreotti, was coming to Palermo.
Giulio Andreotti was coming to speak at a rally before the election for the European parliament. The DC’s candidate was Andreotti’s man Salvo Lima. At a minute to seven on the evening of June the seventh, as the Italian national anthem sounded, Andreotti and Lima made a triumphal entrance side by side into the Nazionale cinema in central Palermo. On stage around Andreotti were the potentates of the Sicilian DC. There was Piersanti Mattarella, president of the Sicilian region. Mattarella would be shot six months later, as he left home to go to mass with his family, for wanting to end the DC’s understanding with Cosa Nostra. There was Vito Ciancimino, the mayor. Ciancimino would be arrested and convicted as mafioso five years later. There was the secretary of the DC in Sicily, Rosario Nicoletti. He was to kill himself in 1984 after being accused of collusion with Cosa Nostra. There was the DC defence minister Ruffini, nephew of the cardinal primate of Sicily and elected with the votes of the friends. There was the Eurocandidate Lima himself. The made man Lima would be shot in 1992. And there was Nino Salvo, who at the time wasn’t widely known outside Sicily. Salvo would be arrested as a mafioso with his cousin and partner Ignazio in 1984. Nino died of a brain tumour during the maxitrial. Ignazio was convicted and was shot in the streets of Palermo in 1992. Until their arrest, the Salvo cousins were mainly known as two of Italy’s richest businessmen, and two of the most powerful figures in the Sicilian DC. The g
roup Letizia caught clustered around Andreotti that evening, joined in euphoria, was the crème de la crème of DC power in Sicily at the end of the seventies.
The Salvo cousins took up a lot of The True History of Italy. For the Palermo chief prosecutor Gian Carlo Caselli and the magistrates working on the Andreotti case they were the link between Cosa Nostra and the DC. They were the intermediaries, said The True History, who’d transmitted to Cosa Nostra the political desire of Andreotti that the prefect of Palermo, general Dalla Chiesa, and the journalist Mino Pecorelli be murdered. The Salvos were much talked about in the offices of L’Ora when Letizia was around, though Letizia didn’t know Nino Salvo when she saw him that evening. She was more interested in getting her shot of Andreotti and Ciancimino laughing and applauding side by side. Ciancimino was already, in 1979, notorious well beyond Palermo as a mafioso, and later, when he’d become the first-ever politician to be convicted as a mafioso, and suddenly nobody ever seemed to have known Vito Ciancimino, Letizia’s was the photo people brought out to show that yes they had.
Two hours later that same evening, Letizia was at the monumental Hotel Zagarella, lately built by the Salvos at Santa Flavia near Bagheria, just outside Palermo. She was there to see Nino Salvo greet Andreotti as he arrived on the threshold surrounded by three hundred members of parliament, senators, city councillors, unionists, and she snapped the group as they entered together: Salvo, Ruffini, Mattarella, Andreotti, Lima, sleek, trim, pomaded, impeccably dressed. She snapped Andreotti again as he made his way through the fellow guests, eyes invisible behind the glinting lenses, an enigmatic smile still on his lips, and Nino Salvo pressed to his side like a double. The menu for the dinner Salvo’s hotel turned on for Andreotti, as L’Ora’s report described it the next day, was clearly aspiring to the aristocratic magnificence of the ceremonial meals in The Leopard, but sounded more worthy of the monumentally vulgar dinner given by the Satyricon’s hugely rich former slave Trimalchio, though without the sexual byplay. Nino Salvo had a lot in common with his fictional Roman antecedent, the huge fortune made in little time, the vast estates in southern Italy. The hotel’s director remembered Salvo first showing Andreotti proudly round his newest twelve-million-dollar jewel, paid for, it was later realized, with Italian government development money from the Fund for the Mezzogiorno. The director recalled him flinging open a door for Andreotti with a sweeping gesture. And here, he’d said, is the banquet room for a thousand guests. The guests on this occasion began with canapés of caviar and smoked salmon, and Russian salad. First course was baked pasticcio of anelletti and lasagne, followed by lobsters and king prawns. Then there were suckling pigs and wild boar, pheasant and milk-fed veal. There were huge fish grilled over charcoal. There were cakes of ricotta and whipped cream, profiteroles and finally a trolley of fresh fruits was wheeled around. A lot of it, and the wines too, would have come from the Salvos’ own estates, just like Trimalchio’s.
Letizia finished her work, went home and forgot about it all. It’d been just a dreary job and the photos were never even published. She didn’t mind. She thought they were awful. Sixteen years later, toward the end of 1993, a squad of carabinieri descended on her studio and took away her archive of negatives. She never dreamt of Andreotti. When she was called in later for questioning, and saw her prints in the hands of Gioacchino Natoli, one of the Andreotti prosecutors, she said to herself My god Letizia, they’re horrendous. The magistrate wanted to know why they’d never been published. It was probably because they were so hideous. And at the time there was nothing special about what they showed. She hadn’t recognized Nino Salvo, but she remembered that day and the climate of apotheosis that had surrounded Andreotti on his visit to Palermo. To be standing next to him then you’d’ve had to be a major player. Her evidence was added to Vito Ciancimino’s, and the Hotel Zagarella’s director’s, and the former minister Ruffini’s memories of that day. All of them clearly recalled Salvo and Andreotti greeting each other like old friends, and conversing privately amid the crowd. The other witnesses were dead.
Why, then, did Andreotti continue to insist so stubbornly to the magistrates that he’d never known the Salvos, even from the papers, never had dealings of any kind with them, didn’t recognize now, when he was asked in 1993, the face in the photo of the man at his side? The refusal to yield an inch on this crucial point, even at the cost of utter disbelief, when to everyone else it was obvious that he must’ve had dealings with the Salvos during his years in power, and when his most secret private telephone number had been found marked Giulio in a Salvo diary, this intransigence, this denial were signs perhaps that he knew like his prosecutors that this was the most dangerous point of all. The Salvos were at the centre of the power structure, the point where mafia and politics met. The connection was at the heart of The True History, and Andreotti must have felt that to give an inch here would be to lose all. So Letizia’s ugly images of Andreotti and Salvo together became maybe the most important evidence of all in the Palermo trial and she a crucial witness. After a while she got used to the idea. She’d never wanted to photograph politicians, but these prints too were a denunciation of Sicily under the mafia. It seemed a little feeble in the circumstances to insist, as Andreotti did, that he’d thought Salvo, whom he scrupulously called the person he’d spent so much time talking to that evening, was the hotel manager.
* * *
SAN DOMENICO is the saint to whom a great baroque church of 1640 is dedicated, one of the best known churches in Palermo, huge and splendid even swathed, as it was in the autumn of 1995, by restorers’ scaffolding and green net. Coming and going from the Sant’Andrea in the evening, buying my papers there in the morning, looking out with a smoking espresso from a balcony of the rabbit-warren hotel almost opposite, I got to know the rhythms of life in the marble-paved piazza that framed the church, around the eighteenth-century monument to the Virgin on its raised stone base. I used to sit on the steps of the monument to call Australia on my cellular phone. On Sunday mornings there was a market there in old coins, photos and postcards and odds and ends. During the week north Africans sold household wares on the pavement, and at night the piazza became the beat of a group of robust transsexuals and transvestites.
They were a workaday lot, or a workanight lot, dressed without excessive fuss or elegance in a drab tailleur, or an old studded leather jacket thrown on over a very minimal miniskirt and dark stockings that left a substantial margin of depilated thigh exposed between stocking top and miniskirt hem. Stiletto heeled shoes or black and silver platforms in any case threw the lines of muscular calf and sturdy haunch into relief, and that very combination of stiletto-heeled shoe, dark stocking and well fleshed rump more than once reminded me of an endlessly repeated trope in the erotic art of Renato Guttuso. Particularly the later erotic art. The older he got, it seemed, the more often Guttuso returned to that feminine triad of high-heeled shoe, dark stocking, woman’s bare rump.
Its acme was the maestro’s huge and unfinished last canvas, In the room the women come and go, which was now covered in transparent plastic and propped up against a storeroom wall in the villa Cattolica at Bagheria. Guttuso had also and hardly coincidentally been a friend of the photographer Helmut Newton. Newton’s special erotic motif, I recalled, was high-class furs and leather, high-heeled shoes, stockings and suspender belts and bare and opalescent female hindquarters, worked and reworked with the same intentness of gaze that Robert Mapplethorpe was later to direct at the African-American penis. In the room the women come and go, a work drained of ideology, narrative, symbolism, drama, meaning, was merely a group of female studies, clothed and unclothed, in movement and repose, and one of them was a direct pictorial quote from Helmut Newton. The compliment had been returned. I’d seen somewhere a dizzying interplay of influences, a photo by Newton of the countess Marzotto flanking a large canvas by Guttuso of herself painted nude, apart from a pair of stockings, and from the rear, in an attitude, approximately, of Islamic prayer.
It wa
s thanks to Letizia that I got to see this painting. I’d mentioned to her my failed attempt to get into villa Cattolica and she’d offered to use some parliamentary clout to get us through those massive chained gates. She’d come out too. She’d never been. We’d made an appointment to drive out with Pietro one morning. But one of Letizia’s daughters was about to give birth to her sixth grandchild, and as I waited by the newspaper kiosk Pietro drove up flustered in the little white car and explained that Letizia’s daughter was in labour and Letizia was needed. We left another morning in a bigger car with a different driver and it started badly. Letizia seemed to have gone off the whole idea and was in a foul mood. The driver was a sullen young man who amplified, in the manner of all Italian functionaries, his boss’s mood. It was his job to make sure you got the message and he swung the car around like a weapon, Letizia rigid beside him. I can’t understand, she said suddenly, why you’re so interested in Guttuso. What is the point of this expedition we’re making? I told her I thought his life and more particularly his death were deeply emblematic of art and politics in postwar Italy. And was he any good as a painter?
This was received in silence. How are we going to find this place? Letizia said suddenly again. Does anyone have any IDEA where we’re going? The driver clearly didn’t and started muttering about Bagheria. I explained that it was quite easy, that I’d been there before. The villa Cattolica was on a bend in the secondary coast road as you drove into town. This was ignored by the two in the front seat. Letizia stared ahead and the driver went on babbling disconnected fragments of faulty information. It’s called the triangle of death, Letizia said abruptly. Because of all the killings. Bagheria’s a vile place. We were still stuck in the traffic of Palermo and I’d suddenly had enough. Fuck them. I really appreciate your getting in touch with these people Letizia and offering to go out there but you’ve clearly got a lot on your mind and a busy day ahead of you and I think perhaps the simplest thing would be for me to go on my own without wasting your time any further—I still had the unused bus ticket from my first attempt. I opened the car door into the traffic. IT’S ALL RIGHT, Letizia said sharply as the car accelerated abruptly. THEY’RE EXPECTING ME. She puffed up her feathers. The director is EAGER to meet me. We drove the rest of the way in silence. They conspired to ignore my directions and thus spent some time driving around the more hideous parts of modern Bagheria before stumbling on the villa.