A story of mafia and love from the early twentieth century. The historical novel by Salvatore Lupo

Very often, the Italian citizen’s ignorance of history is justified by accusing historians of not making people love their subject, not practicing dissemination and writing for a narrow circle of experts. Words that smack of stereotype, but which also contain a robust basis of truth and it is therefore a pleasant surprise that Salvatore Lupo, one of the most successful Italian historians, has decided to cross the threshold that separates archival research from fictional characters by arriving in the bookshop with A story of mafia and love. Lost and found cards (Zolfo publisher, 167 pages, 16 euros).

To stick to the author’s definition we are faced with “a historical novel, or a mixture of history and invention”. The background is the Palermo of the early twentieth century, other cities appear but always linked to what is happening in Palermo. It is a novel of “lost and found papers”, made mainly of letters and torn sheets of paper, diary pages, notes. Like a sedimentation of words around protagonists observed from the outside in their intentions and interests, in their moving pawns that act as if on a theatrical stage. Lupo chooses to narrate with another linguistic register a period that he has repeatedly observed in his essays; he faces the gray area where the result of muffled and difficult to decipher pressures orients actions which – observed from the outside – never reveal their true character.

The protagonist is Ermanno Sangiorgi, police commissioner of Palermo in August 1898, a Romagna expert in the environment having already been in Palermo from 1875 to 1877. He had been Inspector of the Molo district when the Palermo police headquarters had tried to explain the ongoing emergency with the work of a secret and powerful sect, which was influenced by Masonic and Carbonari models. But every era he offers what he produces. From November 1898 to February 1900 Sangiorgi sent the minister 31 reports for a total of 485 pages, in which he outlined the vast associative network – organized into sections and divided into groups, each with a leader – which acted under the protection of influential figures: it was the same structure that Buscetta would have revealed to judge Falcone, with revelations that led to the maxi-trial in February 1986.

Sangiorgi also works for a maxi-trial, identifying 218 mafiosi divided into eight groups in an area that extends from Piana dei Colli to Olivella. He manages to bring 51 defendants to court, 31 are convicted and the sentence is mild, generally 3 years and 6 months. Just as the penalties for other trials that began with many, perhaps too many, ambitions had been very light. Lupo’s historical novel feels the suggestion of Sciascia and his captain Bellodi, strips reality to show its ribs. It starts from the police commissioner Sangiorgi and opens up some questions that are necessarily influenced by the history of our years, it revolves around a fundamental question that bursts out and remains unanswered already in the first pages: can the State, or rather one of its representatives, deal with the mafiosi? To what extent?

The reports of Commissioner Sangiorgi will soon be forgotten, with every emergency we will start all over again while the local political-business circuit and the national one cross paths naturally, in a display of mutual good intentions. The mechanism is oiled by the firm intention of maintaining one’s own power, without opening spaces to other social protagonists. The grains that in theory can aim to jam it are people who are not completely integrated, non-conformists like women sometimes are.

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It is also a love novel, and Ermanno Sangiorgi would allow himself to be put into crisis by Elena, a figure with a strong personality capable of writing to him “you explain who the maintenance people are, what maintenanceism really is”. In a page of his diary, Sangiorgi reflects on Ignazio Florio and his mother, on a theft suffered in their villa in Olivuzza, on the objects that reappeared as if by magic. Elena ends up remembering how her beloved father also kept a guardian who however didn’t show up, her name was enough and no one would have touched anything. All episodes to be observed with new eyes, in an environment where the important thing is not to create scandals either for the present or for the past. And Lupo shows how those particular papers that historians call sources can be manipulated or even suppressed, to suffocate the truth.