“Porte aperte”: la mafia, il fascismo e la polizia negli anni trenta

UCL, Department of Italian
School of European Languages, Culture and Society
Wednesday 12 March 2014, 6:00 p.m.
UCL, Italian Seminar Room, Foster Court 351
Manoela Patti
(University of Catania)
“Porte aperte”: la mafia,
il fascismo e la polizia negli anni trenta
In 1925 Mussolini sent Prefect Cesare Mori to Sicily to defeat the
mafia. The outcome of the “Mori Operation” was a long series of trials,
concluded around 1932, which the regime exploited to celebrate its power
to defeat mafia and change Sicily. In reality, Mussolini and his prefect
Mori did not defeat the mafia, as a serious deterioration of public order in
the early 1930s made apparent. Consequently, Fascism launched a new
anti-mafia campaign, conducted this time under a blanket of silence. This
“second” repression was entrusted by the regime to the Ispettorato
Generale di Pubblica Sicurezza per la Sicilia. The reports compiled by
this body during its investigations demonstrate that in the 1930s there
existed a mafia structure comparable to the one that emerged in the Maxitrial of the 1980s.
ALL WELCOME