Sciascia’s home was the small village of Racalmuto in western Sicily, the traditional mafia stronghold of dry dusty plains and empty mountains. He was, he said, able to write about the criminals because he had grown up observing the pressure put on the villagers by local bosses, and the way that jobs and positions went to those who obeyed mafia orders. He could feel the mafia in his bones, and, in some fundamental sense, felt he was a mafioso himself.

Having decided to base his book on the true story of a local contractor, murdered for refusing to give in to extortion, Sciascia resolved to deliver his message in clear, unmistakable terms. The mafia, he wrote, was not as some suggested a part of colorful Sicilian folklore — but a highly effective secret criminal organization, made up of bosses and middle men, who used kidnapping, kneecapping and execution to extort money and leverage power. It had already moved, Sciascia continued, from its original base in the Sicilian countryside into the cities, where it was feeding on Italy’s postwar building boom. And, unless checked, the mafia would keep going, up through Italy and far beyond. Sciascia then recommended a line of action: the only way to crush this organized criminality before it was too late was to follow the money, check bank accounts and tax returns, and establish why seemingly unemployed grandees were enjoying sumptuous lives.

Few, in 1961, chose to listen. Politicians, churchmen, industrialists and lawyers lined up to say that the mafia was nothing but an invention in the fevered minds of the Communists, traditional opponents of financial malfeasance. As for the author himself, Sciascia was dismissed as a malevolent critic of his beautiful island home, and interested only in the sales of his books. It would take 20 years and the deaths of many brave and principled investigators, some of them his personal friends, before Sicily began to come to grips with its mafia. By then, the mafia had spread just as Sciascia warned it would, digging its tentacles into every corner of Sicilian life, dominating first the fish, meat and citrus markets, then water, then cigarette and drugs. Its bosses were very rich men — with yachts in Palermo harbor and vast estates in the hills beyond — and would soon become wealthier still.

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From boyhood, Sciascia had been fascinated by the idea of justice. As he saw it, Sicily had been overtaken, since soon after the unification of Italy, by corruption at every level. He railed against ministers who took bribes, contractors who made their money through kickbacks, priests who condoned what their parishioners were doing. He kept turning out his gialli, targeting the Church, politicians both in Rome and Palermo, bureaucrats and industrialists too readily seduced by mafia money or  intimated by threats.

Il Contesto — published in English as Equal Danger — was about the venality of the political and legal establishment and its “degraded and impenetrable” power. Todo Modo, One Way or Another, is partly about the Christian Democratic Party. Dominating postwar Italian politics right until the Nineties, Sciascia always hated it for its endless compromises and corruption. Todo Modo is also about clerics, depicted as accomplices in crime. Readers loved him, praising the honesty of this outspoken, melancholic, tenacious man, scourge of Italian immorality. In political and judicial circles he had few friends. He lost even more when he turned his attention, in 1978, to the kidnap and murder of the former Prime Minister Aldo Moro by Red Brigades terrorists. Once again, Sciascia assailed the Christian Democrats, rightly accusing the party, which feared incriminatory revelations by Moro, of wilfully failing to save him. When it was published, The Moro Affair sold 100,000 copies in three weeks.

From the first, Sciascia built his gialli around a single figure, usually a carabiniere detective, sometimes an intrepid magistrate. These were lonely men, staunch, skeptical, obsessive upholders of the law, highly cultured and above all incorruptible. They read the world using their considerable intelligence, deciphering secret, buried things, even when they seemed capricious and every trail led only deeper into the undergrowth. They solved their cases, identified the killers, challenged mafia henchmen and their political backers. But they never won. In no Sciascia novel is a culprit brought to book. This has not stopped a generation of young carabinieri recruits attributing their choice of career to their admiration for Captain Bellodi, the detective in The Day of the Owl.

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As violence in Sicily intensified through the Seventies and early Eighties, bringing bodies to Sicilian streets as clans fought for supremacy, Sciascia went on writing and accusing. Asked why it was that he was never murdered, he would simply say that the mafia did not read fiction. Some of his books dealt with cases of past injustices. These he called inchieste — investigations — where he delved into unsolved stories about disappeared scientists and wrongly accused prelates. Watching the growing number of attacks on prosecutors who grew too close to the truth, Sciascia followed the long corteges of grieving Sicilians bearing their coffins through the streets of Palermo, mourning them all. By now he had become one of Italy’s best-loved writers. One of his last books, translated as Open Doors, was about a “piccolo judice”, a little judge, who refuses to obey the order given him by his superiors to pass a death sentence, though he knows that this will spell the end to his career. The little judge was a “uomo solo”, a man alone, the kind of man that Sciascia loved most, and someone very like himself.

Sciascia died in the autumn of 1989. He lived long enough to see much of what he had written and warned about confirmed. The mafia had indeed moved north, to spread the trade in drugs throughout Europe and cause epidemics of addicts. Three years earlier, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the two immensely brave magistrates who spearheaded the battle against the Sicilian mafia, had managed to bring 471 mafiosi to trial, in a “maxi-processo” (mega-trial) that took place in a concrete bunker built specifically inside Palermo’s Ucciardone prison. They had done so largely by pursuing the money, as Sciascia had proposed, through bank accounts and international financial transactions. Sciascia was in court to watch proceedings and noted that, finally, the immunity that had long protected the mafia had been lifted.

Towards the end of his life, questioned repeatedly for his opinions, Sciascia would say that he had grown afraid of his own prescience, and that in any case the old mafia, retaining a code of honor amid the brutality, was gone. As bad as things were in the Sixties, killings back then were controlled, and senior mafiosi obeyed, something which vanished as the violence spread and more and more players arrived.

By the end, Sciascia claimed he no longer understood what had replaced the mafia of his youth. Just as well, perhaps, that he was no longer alive when Falcone and Borsellino were murdered by mafia bosses enraged at the success of the maxi-processo. Yet Sciascia also didn’t live to see the Italian state finally act against the corruption endemic at the heart of national life, when the “Mani Puliti”, the “clean-hands” group of Milanese magistrates, uncovered and prosecuted a vast number of politicians, civil servants, army officers and industrialists on charges of bribery, fraudulent accounting, kickbacks and misuse of government funds. Among them were many Sicilians.

Yet even now, with the Sicilian mafia paralyzed, Sciascia’s grim premonitions proved accurate. Falcone and Borsellino’s killers were jailed — but since the author’s death, Italian organized crime has spread its wings still further, moving seamlessly into money laundering, prostitution and the smuggling and trafficking of people, using cryptocurrency to conceal its transactions. Along the way, the ‘Ndrangheta, operating out of Calabria, in the remote, impoverished toe of Italy, overtook the Sicilian Cosa Nostra in power and wealth. A loose association of some 500 clans, with over 60,000 members in 84 countries, the ‘Ndrangheta is said today to have an annual income of £49 billion. Perhaps 80% of Europe’s drug trade is channeled through Gioia Tauro, on the coast of Calabria and Italy’s largest container port.

And on it goes. Recent prosecutions have uncovered operations involving shell companies, white-collar intermediaries, prepaid untraceable cards and online foreign exchange platforms — all to launder millions of euros acquired through cocaine, extortion, gambling and human trafficking. Indeed, as prophetic as Sciascia was, he certainly never envisaged the complexity and reach of the modern mafia, a phenomenon that embraces not just Sicily and Calabria but Campania, home to the Camorra, as well as many other associations operating both independently and together, in every continent. In 2023 police across Europe, having staked out an ice-cream parlor in Germany, arrested 108 members of the ‘Ndrangheta for traffic in drugs and weapons. Using Chinese money brokers in Italy, the Calabrians were found to have been running weapons to South America, supplying Brazilian criminal gangs in exchange for cocaine. In response to what is now a global phenomenon, an international police alliance, bringing together 13 countries, has been set up, financed by the Italian Ministry of Public Security.

No Sicilian writer has claimed Sciascia’s mantle as scourge of the mafia — though Andrea Camilleri, a fellow island novelist, often said he imbued his hero Montalbano with Sciascia’s deep shyness. Even so, other brave prosecutors have followed Falcone and Borsellino. One is Nicola Gratteri, who has staged his own mega trial of 331 ‘Ndrangheta suspects in Calabria. Like his famous predecessors, he lives in fear. “I often talk to death,” Gratteri told a journalist not long ago, “because you have to rationalize fear in order to move on”. As the gangs spread yet further, moving into new markets, exploiting every new twist and turn in technology, their crimes copied by loosely associated groups, it is as Sciascia feared: unless checked, in law and in culture, the mafia will always be one step ahead of its pursuers.

***

A Sicilian Man: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul is published by Chatto and Windus on 2 February, 2026.

You will find this notebook displayed in a glass case in the museum dedicated to Lampedusa in Santa Margherita di Belice, Sicily. The front of that building, a palazzo on the main square, is a ghost: all that remained after the earthquake of January 14th, 1968. The quake is thought to have killed more than 400 people. It made rubble and dust of four towns. Photographs displayed in the rebuilt church beside the palace look like the end of the world. Lampedusa refers to the catastrophe obliquely in the last line of the book: writing of his characters and their world he concludes: “Then all found peace in a heap of livid dust.” Such dry lyricism, bony as death, is typical of the writer, The Leopard and Sicily. The dead are hugely present in life and the living here.

In the wake of the great quake of Covid-19, we in Britain and across the West might feel more Sicilian: less insulated than we were, as a people, from life’s final reality. I know I do. We are in need of mighty stories to show us what happens: what happens to people, to the heart, to politics and life and place when the world lurches under your feet and you look down and there is History, jaws like a hippo, eyes like an elephant, looking right back at you.

Il Gattopardo is one such story. One summer the leopard — an ageing aristocrat known as the Prince of Salina — leads his family and their retainers from Palermo to another palazzo, their summer house Donna Fugata, in the island’s far South West. In this shimmering land — it gets so hot in August that crickets explode — a premonition of our climate changing. (Sicily hit 48.8°C last week, a European all-time record.) At Donna Fugata, amid the bronze hills and heat-crazed valleys, we meet Angelica, a local girl, who smites the Leopard’s nephew Tancredi with a terminal case of love at first sight. We meet, too, the fate of the whole island, in the form of her father, Don Calogero Sedara: self-made businessman, person of grip and influence, a nascent Mafioso.

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As a child the young Lampedusa had the privilege of the same summer house: there is memoir everywhere in this novel. Like his Prince, Lampedusa had a main home in Palermo. When it was bombed by the United States Air Force during WWII he became very depressed. Alexandra von Wolff-Stomersee, the Baltic German noblewoman and psychoanalyst, suggested he write about his family’s past. And so, Lampedusa filled that handsome simple notebook with a story, set among his forbears in 1860 — the year Garibaldi and his thousand red-capped fighters liberated Sicily from the ghastly Bourbon regime, and everything appeared to change.

“But don’t you understand, Uncle?” Tancredi cries. He has swapped the uniform of the Bourbon forces for a red cap. “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

It’s a pithily Sicilian judgement on political forces every bit as pitiless as the terremoto, the earthquake, which stills seems to shake the spectral village of Poggioreale, an abandoned village near Santa Margherita di Belice, in the landscape where this part of the story is set. The walls and some of the roofs, the streets and steps are all still there. The people are not. As we consider — nervously, excitedly or fearfully — the post-pandemic version of reality, do you find yourself more concerned that things might be different, or that they might stay the same?

The lives of the ordinary people on Lampedusa’s island barely improved when Italy replaced the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Brutal feudalism, brutal thugs, brutal landowners, brutal politicians and the brutal sun remained. There was still starvation in the South when the twentieth century came. We have known the merest tremor of premonition at the sight and thought of empty shelves, panic buying, uncertainty, death-rate curves, grief and hoarding. Perhaps we needed that warning alarm, given where our planet and we may be headed.

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In The Leopard, it is not their great estates — all losing money — or their tottering, to-be-bombed palaces that get the family through the times of change and prepare them for their coming years of decline and irrelevance. It is the ties between relatives, between friends; it is the understanding, care and respect which transcends class and cash; it is an obsession with the land, with the place itself, that all of them share.

Lampedusa describes his landscape more beautifully than anyone who has ever written about Sicily. The quality of love in his description is fraternal, exasperated and instinctive. The picture it paints applies exactly to the west of Sicily today:

“aridly undulating to the horizon in hillock after hillock, comfortless and irrational, with no lines that the mind could grasp, conceived apparently in a delirious moment of creation; a sea suddenly petrified at the instant when a change of wind had flung the waves into a frenzy.”

These qualities have not changed. When I visited in a gap between lockdowns late last summer, I found Sicily fundamentally the same place I have known since living there in 2005: beautiful, stark, utterly undeluded, still suffering the depredations of the Mafia and their pocket politicians. But also home to magnificent people, to citizens and leaders of vision, humanity and drive. The Sicilians have been honouring all Europeans, by the ways they have been hosting, helping and treating the desperate passengers crossing the sea in small boats from Africa. Here there is ever much more to love there than there is to hate, and The Leopard makes this point, in inference, with pride. Sicily is perhaps the book’s only hero.

Love is realistically done in the book. The Prince loves his wife but starts the story, when family prayers are finished, informing her in so many words that he will be visiting his favourite prostitute that night. Concetta, his brilliant daughter, is too brainy and insufficiently sexy to win the heart of Tancredi, a beautiful and charismatic narcissist. Tancredi’s chance at a full life with her, one of meaning and impact, he misses, preferring the shockingly attractive and dully self-involved Angelica. None of the characters are destined for romantic contentment.

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Lampedusa writes no grand prescriptions. Rather, he suggests, they might have been happier if they had been able to see themselves as clearly as they saw each other. The Covid years have shown us plenty about ourselves and each other — about connection, about the clarity the present moment brings.

Time is a layabout in Sicily, for ill and for good. If you read the book and then watch Luchino Visconti’s adaptation — the match is brilliant and mutually complementary — you will understand its languor, the way Time here is a knowing figure, ever present and yet ever aloof. My current mantra is Today and Tomorrow: if those I love are well and happy today and tomorrow, then we have a great deal to be thankful for. I think I first learned that way of living in Sicily, and from Lampedusa’s Leopard. But it took our times, our changing world, to drive it home.

When he finished his masterpiece — he knew it was good, but he died before it made him famous — Lampedusa allowed himself the smallest flourish. “Fine” — “The End” — he wrote in the middle of that page of his notebook. Something in the script, in the immaculate and emphatic lettering, suggests that that day, anyway, this most pitilessly wise of writers, this phlegmatic genius in his perfect black suit, with his bitter cigarette and his dark daily coffee, was for a moment not unhappy. Perhaps it is a sensation for our times, too; for now, for this summer, for this newish world of ours.