Into the Heart of the Mafia: A Journey Through the Italian South by David Lane

Author:David Lane [Lane, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429928687
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2010-05-31T22:00:00+00:00

8

SCANZANO JONICO

Contagion

WHEN HENRY SWINBURNE journeyed through southern Italy on horseback towards the end of the eighteenth century he entered Calabria on the Ionian coast, travelling south from Basilicata, the small region that lies in the instep of the Italian boot. I was heading north along the Ionica SSI06 state highway, a notoriously dangerous road that I had come to know since arriving in Calabria.

Soon after crossing the boundary between the two regions I reached the River Sinni. Locri Epizefiri, Riace, Crotone, Sibari and now Heraclea, between the Sinni and the River Agri about four miles to the east, the relics of long-dead colonies established by people from ancient Greece dot this coast. A battle took place on the Sinni in 282BC between an alliance of Greeks led by King Pyrrhus of Epirus and the rising forces of Rome that had already seized Crotone, Locri and Reggio Calabria. Although defeated here by superior numbers whose forces included war elephants, and at Asculum in Puglia the following year, Rome would conquer the South and put an end to Magna Grascia. From Pyrrhus’s victory in Puglia would come the pyrrhic victory where the winner’s gains fail to make up for losses, a victory not worth winning.

I had passed another large yacht marina called Marinagri that was nearing completion near the mouth of the Sinni. It had run into legal problems, though of a kind different from those at the marina in Sibari, and was under investigation by the magistrate whom I had met in Catanzaro. Despite the harm that such construction causes, jobs are the main reason southern Italians accept it, legal or illegal.

Having earned a name as somebody willing to speak on touchy issues, I was in Policoro to take part in a debate on legality in Basilicata. The year before I had been asked by the mayor of Tramutola, a village in the upper Agri valley, to name a subject on which I would be willing to speak during its summer festival and I had suggested politics, ethics and legality; hardly something to attract holiday crowds, but the square was full. The speakers in Policoro were the same as those with whom I had shared the platform then, a lawyer and an activist priest.

‘Let’s be honest and admit that there’s a moral question concerning crime and justice in Basilicata and this involves politicians,’ said Vincenzo Montagna, a criminal lawyer with a practice in Policoro. He thinks that there has been a sharp decline in the moral climate since the 1990s when large sums of money arrived, first to compensate the victims of 1980’s earthquake and help reconstruction and then with the discovery of Europe’s largest onshore oilfield near Tramutola. ‘The notion bandied around that Basilicata is a crime-free island in a sea of crime is just a myth,’ Montagna told the people who had gathered in the grounds of Policoro’s thirteenth-century castle to follow the debate.

‘I’m tired of the complacent claims that Basilicata is a happy region, untouched by problems that neighbouring regions face.

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