Corleone graveyard set to get Riina body

(ANSA) - Palermo, November 20 - 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