The town of Corleone dozes
beneath the Busambra fortress where Jesuit priests once
cultivated the land then belonging to the Church before it ended
up in the hands of just a few owners at the end of the 18th
century.
Now it is awaiting the arrival of the coffin containing the
body of Totò Riina, who will be buried in the cemetery in Via
Guardia as the leader of the Mafia organisation that has held
sway since the end of the Second World War.
The cemetery, a 'Spoon River' of Sicily's Cosa Nostra, after
Edgar Lee Master's famous collection of fictional post-mortem
epigraphs of the make-believe US town, is already the final
resting place of Luciano Liggio, who was on the run from 1963 to
1974 and died in prison in 1993; the mafioso doctor Michele
Navarra who was killed by Liggio in 1958, 13 years after being
appointed clan leader by his cousin, Italo-American boss Angelo
Di Carlo; Giuseppe "Peppino" Ruffino, Liggio's right hand man;
and the ashes of Bernardo Provenzano. The list could go on.
The rural landscape still dominates the town of 11,000
inhabitants, and the anarchic construction indicates its failed
attempt at modernisation.
Until 1959 the capital of Cosa Nostra also held the remains
of Bernardino Verro, the town's first Socialist mayor and one of
the protagonists of the Fasci Siciliani uprising of 1893.
Moreover, it still holds the ashes of Placido Rizzotto, the
trades unionist who was abducted on March 10, 1948, and whose
remains were found in a sinkhole on Rocca Busambra in 2009 and
identified using DNA analysis.
Five years ago a tomb containing two bodies was uncovered at
the cemetery. It was thought that one was Verro, but this was
not the case; the other is believed to be Calogero Bagarella,
the brother of Leoluca and of Ninetta, Riina's wife, who was
killed in 1969 in Palermo in the massacre in Viale Lazio in
which five people died. The skull presents a bullet hole
possibly left by the boss Michele Cavataio shortly before he
died.
Now the cemetery is preparing to receive the remains of
Riina, 'u curtu ('Shorty').
The creak of the gate on Via Guardia accompanies the end
credits of the Roaring Mafia's film.
photo: Provenzano's family tomb
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