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Made in Sicily. Giorgio Locatelli
Читать онлайн.Название Made in Sicily
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007457229
Автор произведения Giorgio Locatelli
Жанр Кулинария
Издательство HarperCollins
The roots were already there in agriculture under Spanish rule, because the barons who owned the big estates were away in Palermo and in their absence they appointed managers, middle men known as gabelotti, who took a foothold of power, and whose ruthless henchmen were known as campieri. Out of this grew the Mafia, tapping into the Sicilian idea of Cosa Nostra, the sense of family, of looking after one another, all bound up with a sense of fate, maybe inherited from the Greeks, that somehow made the people trust in the Mafiosi, because they were their own, even though they ruled by fear and brutality.
What is interesting is that in the east side of the island the Mafia didn’t take hold in the same way, because there, under the Spanish, the land was allowed to be inherited by a son, and so there were small tenements, rather than baronial estates, and not the same need for the powerful ‘middle men’.
It is only when you spend time in the western side of the island, and get to know the people and the way the place is run, that you can begin to understand that the Mafia is everywhere, but there is no way you can tell who is the Mafia. It is an undercurrent. It is there, and it is not there. Nobody sees; everybody knows. The prices are controlled, and the territory is controlled, centimetre by centimetre.
For a long time, the existence of the Mafia as a structured organisation was denied, right up to the trials of the eighties. Even now there are people who will say it doesn’t exist or, ‘They are good people. They make things work.’ Yes. But it has been proven that the mafia is bad for business, because its presence has slowed down the development of Sicily in comparison to other regions of Italy.
What I feel is that Cosa Nostra is inside the people; you cannot defeat it on the streets, or in the courts of justice alone; you have to do it in heads and minds. In Midnight in Sicily, Peter Robb quotes the writer Leonardo Sciascia, who summed up perfectly the complicated relationship that exists between the community and the Mafia: ‘Take this Sicilian reality I live in: a lot of things that make it up I disapprove of and condemn, but I see them with pain and from inside … It hurts when I denounce the mafia because a residue of mafia feeling stays alive in me, as it does in any Sicilian. So struggling against the mafia I struggle against myself. It’s like a split, a laceration.’
I see some pessimism, but a lot of optimism. Pessimism because not everyone believes in change, and because some say that when the Mafia appears quiet it is at its most dangerous; and optimism in a new-found strength and pride among restaurateurs and food producers, boosted by organisations like Slow Food, which is helping the people to understand that there is a different way to market their food. And then you see the Libera Terra farming projects, in which land confiscated from convicted Mafia bosses is being given to co-operatives of young people to grow crops or make wine. The most famous is the Terre di Corleone, where a vineyard has been planted on the land of the imprisoned Salvatore ‘Toto’ Riina, near the town whose name Mario Puzo borrowed for his family in The Godfather. Ironically, he chose it just because he liked the sound of the name (which means Lionheart), with no idea of how notorious Corleone was to become as a Mafia town a decade later. When you see these agricultural projects, you have real hope that at last the people will begin to accept that they can work this beautiful land for themselves, and come out from under the cloud of Cosa Nostra.
Verdure
Vegetables
Insalata di olive verdi schiacciate
Insalata di broccoli, mandorle e peperoncino
Insalata d’acciughe, fagiolini e mandorle