Storia della mafia | Salvatore Lupo

It's not true that the Mafia represents a mere remnant of archaic anti-state cultures, based on family ties and a sense of honor. The truth is that it has successfully adapted to processes of modernization, profiting from them. It did so in western Sicily, the birthplace of the word and the concept. It did so in other forms and under other names in other parts of Southern Italy. And it did so in the United States, a country where, on the one hand, it spread from its Mediterranean island of origin; but which, on the other, has generated other similar forms of serious crime and malpractice. The Mafia reflects a perverse mechanism embedded in society, which undermines individual and collective freedoms. But it has happened (for example, with Fascism) that, in fighting it, a government has in turn undermined freedoms. And in any case, the Mafia's successes, or vice versa, its defeats, hark back to the events of great history, which saw a great nation-state like Italy, and the greatest global power, the United States, experience an alternation of opposing policies: tolerance and opposition. The following will be discussed: Anti-Mafia operations between the two world wars, in Italy and America. Anti-Mafia during the Cold War. Mafia protagonism during the Republic's crisis (1979-1993). Speaker Salvatore Lupo is a full professor of Contemporary History at the Department of Humanities at the University of Palermo. He was the founder and co-director of the journal "Meridiana." He has published numerous studies on the history of Italy during the Liberal, Fascist, and Republican eras; on the history of Sicily and Southern Italy; and on the history of both the Sicilian and American Mafia. Some of his books have been translated into many languages. Among these: History of the Mafia from Unification to Today (Donzelli, 1993), Fascism. Politics in a Totalitarian Regime (Donzelli, 2000). His latest volume on the Mafia in English: The Two Mafias. A Transatlantic History, 1882-2008 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015). His latest and most mature work in Italian: The Mafia. One Hundred and Sixty Years of History (Donzelli 2018). For Le Monnier University, he published, with Angelo Ventrone, The Contemporary Age (2018).