Palermo: The War, the Mafia and the Sack of a City

The Florios’ own golden age, the opera houses and new money of Palermo’s turn-of-the-century boom, is a story for its own post. For now, we pick up as that boom was already turning to bust, and follow Palermo through its hardest century: emigration, the heaviest bombing of any Italian city after Naples, and a mafia takeover of the rebuilding that followed.

A boom already turning to bust

The signs of trouble were there before the twentieth century had properly begun. The shoals of tuna that swam into the nets at Favignana every spring, the backbone of the Florio fortune, had started to thin: from over 14,000 fish a year in 1845 to roughly half that by 1900. Marsala wine, once a fixture of the British Navy’s wardroom, was losing ground to sherry, port and Madeira, while the Navy itself had long since switched its sailors to a rum ration. Worst of all was sulphur. Sicily had supplied most of the world’s sulphur for a century, mined at brutal human cost, but in the 1890s the American chemist Herman Frasch developed a way of melting it out of the ground with superheated water rather than sending men and boys underground to dig it. Once the Frasch process became commercially viable in the early 1900s, the Sicilian sulphur trade collapsed almost overnight.

The emigration years

With the old industries failing, people left. Palermo was designated an official port of emigration in 1903, and the countryside emptied out towards it and onward, mostly to the United States. A further blow came in the early 1920s, when the Italian government broke up Palermo’s shipbuilding monopoly and redistributed it to Naples, costing the city one of its largest employers at the worst possible moment. Through the 1920s Palermo’s population fell as emigration accelerated, and the city had barely begun to recover when the Second World War arrived.

The most bombed city after Naples

Palermo’s harbour, a departure point for Axis convoys supplying North Africa, made it a target from early in the war. British bombers flying from Malta began raiding from January 1941, though with limited aircraft and limited damage. Everything changed once the Allies took North African airfields in 1943 and the USAAF could reach Palermo with heavy B-17 bombers. The raids that followed were relentless: 36 bombers dropped 94 tons on the harbour on 1st March, 48 bombers dropped 130 tons on the harbour and rail yards on 17th and 18th April, and on 9th May alone, 211 bombers dropped 315 tons, killing several hundred people in a single day. By the time it was over, an estimated 2,123 civilians had been killed and several thousand more wounded, making Palermo the second most bombed city in southern Italy after Naples. Allied troops landed on 10th July 1943, and Palermo fell to General Patton’s Seventh Army less than two weeks later.

Lucky Luciano and the fall of Palermo

How much easier Patton’s task really was is still argued over, but the story usually told involves a gangster from Lercara Friddi named Salvatore Lucania, better known to the world as Lucky Luciano. Born there in 1897, the son of a sulphur miner, he emigrated with his family to New York in 1906, rose through the Five Points Gang, and in 1931 had his rival Salvatore Maranzano killed, clearing his path to become capo di tutti capi, boss of bosses, of American organised crime. Notably, he chose not to take the title: instead he abolished it and set up the Commission, a governing council of crime families, in its place. Jailed in 1936 on a thirty-to-fifty-year sentence, Luciano struck a wartime deal with US Naval Intelligence, known afterwards as Operation Underworld, trading intelligence and Sicilian Mafia contacts for the promise of an early release. Whether his network genuinely smoothed the Allied advance through western Sicily, as is often claimed, or whether his role has simply grown in the telling, historians still disagree. What’s less disputed is what came after: this wartime collaboration between American and Sicilian organised crime is widely blamed for supercharging the Mafia’s postwar return to Palermo itself, a city its rural cousin had largely left alone before the war.

The Sack of Palermo

Sicily gained its own regional parliament on 25th May 1947, a rare piece of good news in a hard decade, but real power over the rebuilding of Palermo fell to other hands entirely. Bombing had destroyed or damaged huge swathes of housing, and migrants were still arriving from the countryside, so demand for new homes was enormous, much of it funded by public money. From the mid-1950s, two Mafia-linked officials, Vito Ciancimino and Salvo Lima, controlled the city’s Office of Public Works, and in the years that followed thousands of building licences were signed off to a small handful of frontmen with no genuine construction business at all. Mafia-connected builders demolished historic palaces, including elegant Liberty-style villas from the same boom years we set aside at the start of this post (Ernesto Basile’s Villa Deliella among them, pulled down overnight before new preservation rules could take effect), and threw up cement apartment blocks, often shoddy, across a ring of new suburbs.

People were lured out of the crumbling centre with tiny deposits on these new flats, only to find themselves dependent on the same men for both their homes and their jobs. For years, that made the Mafia look to many ordinary Palermitani less like an occupying power and more like the only functioning authority in the city, a perception that cost them far more than they ever gave back. It was, fittingly, a mafia boss’s arrest that is said to have finished off the Vucciria, once one of Palermo’s great markets and the subject of a well-known painting by Renato Guttuso, while the “Treno del Sole” carried a generation of young Palermitani north in search of work the city itself couldn’t provide. The wartime partnership with the American underworld, meanwhile, had by then evolved into something darker still: a trade in tobacco, arms and, above all, heroin.

A city looking up again

Eighty years on, central Palermo still carries the scars of that period, but the story of the last decade or so is a genuinely happier one. A congestion charge, introduced in 2018, and the pedestrianisation of large parts of the historic centre, both once dismissed as impossible, have quietly reshaped how the city works. Young Palermitani are returning rather than leaving, and tourism, Esplora Travel’s own small-group cultural tour of Sicily among the reasons why, has come back to the city in real numbers. It’s a fitting note to end this series on: a city that has spent two and a half thousand years being founded, conquered, enriched, impoverished and rebuilt, and still, evidently, has more chapters left to write.