Authors: Tom Behan
When somebody becomes head of the Commission their house becomes a port of call for people from all over the island. Gaetano Badalamenti’s house used to be frequented by ordinary people, then at a certain point certain well-known individuals were always going in and out of it. There were loads of Mercedes and BMWs parked outside, whereas virtually everyone else had little Fiat 500s. I remember I used to go into bars during that period and people were saying: ‘these days Gaetano Badalamenti has got top-level friends in Rome, he’s a friend of Andreotti’. People would turn round and say: ‘What? Andreotti?’ Today maybe it would be dangerous to say something like that, but back then it was something that was said openly, with pride.
Badalamenti’s main meeting place was the Palazzolo bar, which significantly was in front of the council building. And as one of his opponents was forced to recognise: ‘Whenever Badalamenti went to a bar he was always surrounded by loads of people, people who were desperate in one way or another.’ Badalamenti and his gang could supply the commodity that people in town were most desperate for, and it wasn’t drugs – it was jobs.
It was my husband who told me we had to go to Don Tano’s house out of courtesy, when Peppino was already making his accusations. I didn’t want to go, and every time we used to argue about it. But his wife had been asking about us, and it always used to make my husband happy. Badalamenti’s house was always full of people – and what a queue there was outside his door! And how could I ever forget the luxury – two people used to come from Palermo to clean Badalamenti’s Persian carpets. I remember once we were talking and somebody asked me: ‘What’s your son, a Maoist?’ So I told him, ‘everyone’s got their own party. You’ve got your own one, and he and his friends have got another one. Everybody’s got their own.’
Nowadays Badalamenti never even asked after Felicia’s son Peppino. Maybe this was because he had more important things on his mind, or maybe he was simply too angry about Peppino’s activities.
aybe Badalamenti’s henchman was right to call Peppino Impastato a Maoist. While Peppino and others were simply unaware that Mao was a brutal
dictator, they were nevertheless committed revolutionary socialists, people who believed that fundamental change could not come through parliamentary politics and parties. Locally, they had seen all the major parties slowly moving towards direct or indirect accommodation with the Mafia. So their aim was still the creation of a mass national movement outside parliament, concentrating on where people were collectively strong – principally where they worked.
But by the early 1970s – after several years of intense political activity – Peppino’s generation could see that the revolution wasn’t round the corner. So without changing their ideas, they started to take seriously issues such as local and national elections. In 1972 Peppino took part in the general election campaign built around a left-wing newspaper,
Il Manifesto
. The results weren’t that encouraging, but Peppino more than others became increasingly convinced that the comfortable set-up at Cinisi council needed to be challenged.
Given that they really didn’t have the experience or forces to mount their own campaign, in the same year Peppino and his group decided to put their votes behind the Communist Party, the only left-wing force standing in local council elections. They had very little faith in the enthusiastically parliamentary Communist Party, what they wanted perhaps more than anything else was for people to see there was at least some kind of alternative to the sleazy Christian Democrats.
Soon after the election they were shocked. The sole Communist councillor they had helped to elect repaid them by joining a coalition with the Christian Democrats and became deputy mayor. It was the hypocrisy of the Communists that they found so irritating. In the same period in which their councillor was in alliance with the Christian Democrats, the local branch wrote an article in its area magazine entitled: ‘Is Capitalism’s Crisis Caused by the Oil Crisis?’ which contained the following conclusion: ‘It’s clear that the struggle will not be easy and will not develop in a linear fashion, but today it has never been clearer that socialism is the only real solution to the intrinsic anarchy of the capitalist system.’ How could the party face two directions at the same time, talking about socialism while sharing power with the traditional facilitators of Italian capitalism? All of this caused a lot of bitterness, which was to last until the Communist Party dissolved itself in the 1990s.
So Peppino decided that revolutionaries should stand on their own platform. In 1976 he was a candidate in regional elections for a revolutionary party called Lotta Continua (Continuous Struggle), obtaining 4 per cent of the vote and the highest number of personal preference votes out of all candidates – 350.
One of the reasons he was so successful was that he had become a very popular public speaker. Sometimes up to a thousand people came to Peppino’s campaign speeches, an incredible number in a town of around ten thousand people. As Piero Impastato says, people came to listen not just because he had a good style of speaking: ‘Many people used to come to hear his speeches, even right wingers and
Mafiosi
, who would either listen or blow raspberries. The real reason though was that Peppino named names – both politicians and
Mafiosi
. If you stop and think, though, this was the early 1970s – how did he manage to do that?’ It took a lot of courage to stand up against the political and criminal establishment of the town, but Peppino did it. Another member of his group, Pino Manzella, concurs: ‘Loads of people came to hear Peppino speak. People were curious to hear what names he named. And the way he used to talk was like a bulldozer.’
But Peppino and the others were not interested in becoming dull and unimaginative local politicians. While a few of them stood in elections, they still wanted to create an active campaigning group. The idea they developed was to appeal to young people on a cultural level primarily, rather than concentrate immediately on ideology.
It was the ‘Summer of Love’ in 1967; people were going to San Francisco and wearing flowers in their hair. But in towns like Cinisi it was still winter. Girls couldn’t go out unaccompanied and had to wear sensible clothes, young men wore jackets and ties and cut their hair short. Felicetta Vitale looks back at the difficulties young people had back then:
It was very difficult for boys and girls to meet, you used to have go somewhere where nobody could see you because you couldn’t meet up publicly. For a boy and girl to be seen together in public, talking together on the Corso was seen as a provocation by their parents.
So you’d get criticised at home – sometimes they would stop you from going out in the evenings – obviously this only happened to girls, not boys. And to avoid these problems you had to meet up in the back streets. One of the favourite places was behind the church, because not many people lived round there.
Traditional Catholicism was strong. In most Italian schools religious education was taught by priests, and to prepare for their first communion and confirmation most Italian children had to go to Sunday school. Entertainment and holidays were often run by the Church, local churches organised holiday outings for poor families, run by priests or local volunteers.
Many towns also had a cinema run by the Church. The sequence in the film
Cinema Paradiso
, set in the Sicily of the 1950s, where the young film operator Salvatore discovers all the scenes censored by the priest from classic films, was very close to reality. Growing up as a boy in Terrasini in the 1950s, Salvo Vitale recalls: ‘I can remember going to church once and seeing the priest with a list of films, categorised as “for everyone”, “for adults” and “banned”. And priests would openly tell you which films you were and weren’t allowed to see. I clearly remember one Neapolitan film,
Core ’ngrato
, was banned because there was a kiss in it.’ Some young Italians who had grown up in the 1970s only realised that there was a dance scene between Olivia Newton John and John Travolta at the end of
Grease
when they watched it on television many years later, because priests cut the scene due to the ‘provocative’ clothing and behaviour.
For decades there had been no serious challenge to the Church’s self-appointed role of guardian of public morals. For example, in 1951 there were 48 marriages performed with a religious ceremony in Cinisi and just six without; in 1974 there were 64 religious ceremonies and just two civil ceremonies.
Individuals such as Peppino Impastato were not just breaking from the Mafia, they were also challenging these restrictive traditions. So another revolutionary input from this young group of activists, as Pino Manzella recalls, was trying to date girls in a ‘modern’ way. The tradition that dominated at that time was that girls only went out in public if they were escorted by relatives. For a boy and a girl to go out together, the boy needed to ask permission from her parents. Peppino, Pino and others started actively to disobey this unwritten rule, and although they weren’t spectacularly successful, discovered that many girls looked upon their efforts with sympathy. So although ‘the Summer of Love’ never arrived in Cinisi, by the late 1960s winter was turning to spring.
One of the collective moments when many of these rules were disobeyed was during the period of Carnival, in midFebruary. For a few days Cinisi would be ‘turned upside down’ and normal conventions abandoned, particularly those stopping men from mixing with women. People would dress up in costumes, open their front doors to strangers and allow people to dance together. Confetti would be thrown around the street, and some people would drink a lot. On one memorable occasion the wife of the actor Gaspare Cucinella came out on her balcony and yelled at her drunken husband to come home. His provocative response was almost a complaint: ‘If it wasn’t for you, I would be full of alcohol and syphilis.’ Not that all conventions disappeared at Carnival: women still had to be ‘protected’ by men. If they were to go into the houses of strangers and dance they had to be masked, and there had to be an unmasked man to escort them who would knock at the door of a house, and if his voice was recognised the door would be opened.
Gaetano Badalamenti couldn’t stand the sight of me because I always took the mickey out of him. One evening during Carnival, when people used to go from one house to another, dancing and so on, I was walking down the Corso with my wife and he was coming up it with his. And he said to me: ‘get out of my way and let me through’. I just answered: ‘why don’t you get out of my way?’ We could have stayed there the whole night, but he moved out of way. Why did he do this? One of my uncles was a friend of his, so he didn’t want to offend him.
These were the moments when extrovert and imaginative people such as Gaspare Cucinella became close to Peppino, who once wrote a bittersweet poem about Carnival:
Today we throw our masks off
By masking ourselves.
Carnival is a very strange festival:
Hypocrisy is defeated
By making a masked monument to it.
Tonight I want to cut up all of my feelings Into a thousand coloured confetti.
Then I will throw them at the throng of revellers To brighten up their dancing.
Along with new ideas, new technologies were starting to circulate. In Partinico, Giuseppe Nobile recalls: ‘In 1975 the first person ever talked to me about videotapes – it was Peppino – at the time I didn’t even know what they were!’ Although widespread use of videos was still several years off, Peppino showed video footage several times when he stood as a candidate in spring 1976.
In a practical sense, Peppino’s cultural horizons were broadened by what was happening in nearby Terrasini. Starting in autumn 1974, for the next two years young people ran an experimental but popular theatre group, having created a stage of 40 square metres and an auditorium of 150 seats within a larger public building. This same group then launched a series of weekly alternative film showings in early 1975, which were always followed by a public debate. Peppino came and took part in nearly all of them.
This experience encouraged him to set up the Music and Culture Club in Cinisi in 1976. The core of this group was between 10 and 15 people, and they organised film shows, concerts, theatre activities, photographic exhibitions. The most popular events were the film shows: the meeting room would fill with up to 100 people. One of the reasons it was popular was because it was a place where young men and women could socialise. Two young people who met at Music and Culture were Peppino’s younger brother Giovanni and Felicetta Vitale. A small but very determined woman, she and Giovanni would act as a team in all their battles over the coming decades:
I really got involved with politics through Music and Culture, and with the feminist collective that grew up within it. So I took part in meetings, debates and so on. And Peppino always encouraged us women to get active and start speaking in public; Fanny Vitale, Pino Manzella’s wife, was the first one to speak at a rally.
We moved on to debates with women’s groups that came from Palermo. What we really wanted was that ordinary people – housewives – came and discussed women’s issues, such as abortion and divorce. We had a very direct approach: ‘come on, get involved!’ There was a big debate within the group about how to approach people, and I for one felt that if you related to people aggressively you would alienate them. I disagreed with the idea of saying: ‘we don’t want anything to do with men, our problems are our own’. I wanted for men to feel that these were their problems too, that these issues were shared.
But we did make some headway locally, even though feminists were generally not looked upon positively – and this included my parents as well.
Margherita Galati was 16 or 17 at the time, and has similar memories of what the club meant for her, and how the older generation tried to stop her from taking part:
My elder brother suggested I start going to Music and Culture because they used to show films there. And I must say, it was thanks to Peppino I began to understand the reality of the town I lived in and to keep my distance from certain kinds of people.
We used to get pressured at home by our families, though. They’d say to us: ‘you shouldn’t go there, it’s a place of perdition. You’ll end up being prostitutes, you’ll totally lose your way.’ My mother used to lose her temper and pull me by the hair, banging my head against the wall – so my reaction was to keep on going there.
The growth of a feminist group was something Peppino was very proud about. In fact, he used to boast to his male friends that feminists had knitted a jumper for him.
In any event Music and Culture filled a yawning gap for young people tired of traditional family life and the eternal immobility of peasant culture. Such was its success that the Communist Party, now worried about a sizeable young left-wing opposition that had rooted itself in the town, unsuccessfully tried to gain control over it.
Peppino’s activities ratcheted up the tension in the Impastato household. His mother Felicia recounts the reaction of his angry father: ‘I wanted to run away . . . when my husband rang the door bell I used to run into the bathroom. There were always arguments because they used to come and tell him: “hey, your son has just made a speech, he had a go at the Mafia”.’ Luigi used to tell his wife: ‘ “he can talk about anything, all the other parties, the fascists . . . but he absolutely can’t talk about the Mafia” – you couldn’t touch the Mafia, it was
untouchable
.’ Felicia tried to hold Peppino back: ‘I used to tell Peppino to watch what he was doing – “Be careful”, and he used to answer – “people and kids need to be told what the Mafia is”.’ If the Mafia was meant to be untouchable, then Peppino was unstoppable.