The Portella della Ginestra massacre refers to the killing of 11 people and 27 wounded during May Day celebrations in Sicily on 1 May 1947, in the municipality of Piana degli Albanesi. Those held responsible were the bandit and separatist leader Salvatore Giuliano and his gang, although their motives and intentions are still a matter of controversy.
From May 1893, during the period of the Fasci Siciliani, the peasants of the neighbouring towns of Piana degli Albanesi, San Giuseppe Jato and San Cipirello used to gather at Portella della Ginestra for the Labour Day celebrations at the initiative of the physician and peasant leader Nicola Barbato, who used to speak to the crowd from a big rock that was later called "Barbato's Stone". The tradition was interrupted during the Fascist period and resumed after the fall of the Fascist regime.[2][3]
With national elections set for October 1947, the leftist victory in Sicily created speculation that a coalition led by Palmiro Togliatti might bring Italy under communist rule. In Sicily, the leader of the Sicilian branch of the communists, Girolamo Li Causi, pledged to redistribute large land holdings, but to preserve any sized 100 hectares (247 acres) or less.[4]
The massacre
On 1 May 1947, hundreds of mostly poor peasants gathered at Portella della Ginestra, three kilometers from the town of Piana degli Albanesi on the way to San Giuseppe Jato for the traditional international Labour Day parade. At 10:15, the Communist party secretary from Piana degli Albanesi began to address the crowd when gunfire broke out.[5] It was later determined that machine guns had been fired from the surrounding hills, as well as by men on horseback. Eleven people were killed, including four children, Serafino Lascari (15), Giovanni Grifò (12), Giuseppe Di Maggio (13) and Vincenza La Fata (8). Twenty-seven people were wounded, including a little girl who had her jaw shot off.[5]
The attack was attributed to the bandit and separatist leader Salvatore Giuliano.[6] His aim had been to punish local leftists for the recent election results. In an open letter he took sole responsibility for the murders and claimed that he had only wanted his men to fire above the heads of the crowd; the deaths had been a mistake.[5]
Until the massacre, Giuliano had been regarded by many as a modern-day Robin Hood who stole from (and even kidnapped) wealthy Sicilians to help the impoverished Sicilians. The shooting of children and peasants at Ginestra, however, outraged his former admirers, and a bounty of three million lire ($13,200 in 1947, $150,000 in 2019) was offered by the Italian government for Giuliano's capture.[7]
The massacre created a national scandal. The Communist-controlled Italian General Confederation of Labour called a general strike in protest against the massacre. According to newspaper reports hints at the possibility of civil war were heard as Communist leaders harangued meetings of 6,000,000 workers who struck throughout Italy in protest against the May Day massacre in Sicily.[6][8]
The Minister of the Interior, the Christian DemocratMario Scelba, reported to Parliament the next day that so far as the police could determine, the Portella della Ginestra shooting was non-political. Bandits notoriously infested the valley in which it occurred, said Scelba.[6][9] Li Causi disagreed and charged that the Mafia had perpetrated the attack, in cahoots with the large landowners, monarchists and the rightist Common Man's Front. The debate ended in a fist fight between the left and the right. Nearly 200 deputies took part in the brawl.[6]
Li Causi and Scelba would be the main opponents in the aftermath of the massacre and the successive killing of the suspected perpetrator Giuliano, and the trial against Giuliano's lieutenant Gaspare Pisciotta and other remaining members of Giuliano's gang. While Scelba dismissed any political motive, Li Causi stressed the political nature of the massacre – and tried to uncover the truth. Li Causi claimed that the police inspector Ettore Messana – supposed to coordinate the persecution of the bandits – had been in league with Giuliano and denounced Scelba for allowing Messana to remain in office. Later documents would prove the accusation.[11]
Li Causi suspected a campaign against the left and linked it with the crisis in the national government (under Prime MinisterAlcide De Gasperi), which would lead to the expulsion of the communists and socialist from government, as well as to prevent the left from entering the regional government. On 30 May 1947, Giuseppe Alessi, became the first president of the Sicilian region with the support of the centre right and the same day De Gasperi announced his new centrist government, who had been in the national union governments since 1945.[2]
Challenging Giuliano
Girolamo Li Causi addressing a commemorative meeting in Portella della Ginestra
Speaking at Portella della Ginestra on the second anniversary of the massacre, Li Causi publicly called on Giuliano to name names. He received a written reply from the bandit leader:
It is only men with no shame who gives out names. Not a man who tends to take justice into his own hands; who aims to keep his reputation in society high, and who values this aim more than his own life.
Li Causi responded by reminding Giuliano that he would almost certainly be betrayed: "Don't you understand that Scelba will have you killed." Giuliano again replied, hinting at the powerful secrets that he possessed:
I know that Scelba wants to have me killed; he wants to have me killed because I keep a nightmare hanging over him. I can make sure he is brought to account for actions that, if revealed, would destroy his political career and end his life.[5][12]
Salvatore Giuliano was killed on 5 July 1950, when the hearings for the trial against Giuliano's captured associates started in Viterbo, near Rome. He always denied that there had been anyone behind him who had ordered the killing. However, his lieutenant Pisciotta and other witnesses claimed that a few days before the massacre, on April 27, 1947, Giuliano had received a letter, which he destroyed immediately after reading it. He told his gang: "Boys, the hour of our liberation is at hand." According to the witnesses, the letter demanded the massacre at Portella della Ginestra in exchange for liberty for all of the gang.[5][13]
Viterbo trial
The trial against the perpetrators for the massacre started in the summer of 1950 in Viterbo. Scelba was again said to have been involved in the plot to carry out the massacre, but the accusations were often contradictory or vague. In the end the judge concluded that no higher authority had ordered the massacre, and that the Giuliano band had acted autonomously.[5] At the Viterbo trial Pisciotta said:
Again and again Scelba has gone back on his word: Mattarella and Cusumano returned to Rome to plead for total amnesty for us, but Scelba denied all his promises.
Pisciotta also claimed that he had killed the bandit Salvatore Giuliano in his sleep by arrangement with Scelba. However, there was no evidence that Scelba had had any relationship with Pisciotta.[13]
At the trial for the Portella della Ginestra massacre, Gaspare Pisciotta said:
Those who have made promises to us are called Bernardo Mattarella, Prince Alliata, the monarchist MP Marchesano and also Signor Scelba, Minister for Home Affairs … it was Marchesano, Prince Alliata and Bernardo Mattarella who ordered the massacre of Portella di Ginestra. Before the massacre they met Giuliano…" However the MPs Mattarella, Alliata and Marchesano were declared innocent by the Court of Appeal of Palermo, at a trial which dealt with their alleged role in the event.[11][14]
Pisciotta was sentenced to life imprisonment and forced labour; most of the other 70 bandits met the same fate. Others were at large, but one by one they all disappeared. Pisciotta probably was the only one who could reveal the truth behind the massacre. While he was in Giuliano's band, he carried a pass signed by a colonel of the Carabinieri that allowed him to move freely about the island. At the trial he declared, "We are one body: bandits, police and Mafia – like the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit."[5]
While serving his sentence he wrote his autobiography awaiting a new trial at which he would be charged with killing Giuliano. Some authorities were beginning to take his evidence more seriously, and perjury and other charges were made against police and Carabinieri. Pisciotta realised that he had been abandoned and was threatening to reveal much more than at the first trial, in particular who signed the letter which had been brought to Giuliano just before the attack.[13] On 9 February 1954, he took a cup of coffee with what he thought was a tuberculosis medicine. Instead, someone had replaced it with strychnine. Within an hour he was dead and his autobiography disappeared.[5]
The massacre created a national scandal, which ended in 1956 with the conviction of the remaining members of Giuliano's gang. It still remains a highly controversial topic. The finger of blame has been pointed at numerous sources, including the Italian government. Leftists who were the victims of the attack have blamed the landedbarons and the Mafia; significantly, the memorial plaque erected by them makes no mention of Giuliano or his band:
On May 1, 1947, while celebrating the working class festival and the victory of April 20, men, women and children of Piana, S. Cipirello and S. Giuseppe fell under the bullets of the Mafia and the landedbarons to crush the struggle of the peasants against feudalism.[15]
—Portella della Ginestra massacre memorial plaque
Theories
While some historians see the massacre as a conspiracy of the Mafia, anti-communist political forces – the Christian-Democratic party in particular – and American intelligence services in the wake of the Cold War,[16][17] others consider the bloodbath as the culmination of local struggles for land rights and land reform in the area of Piana degli Albanesi and San Giuseppe Jato. Just as at the end of World War I, the post-war period saw an increase of violence between landowners backed by the Mafia and left-wing peasant movements. A few weeks before the massacre, the local Mafia boss of Piana, Francesco Cuccia, and others had asked landowners for money to "put an end to the communists once and for all." They made clear that they were ready to go beyond the traditional acts of Mafia violence that had been used against the socialist peasant movement before the rise of fascism in the early 1920s when six socialist militants had been killed in Piana.[18][19]
"Without the consent of the Mafia in Piana degli Albanesi, San Giuseppe Jato and San Cipirello, Giuliano could not have shot at Portella della Ginestra," according to the historian Francesco Renda. Renda, among others, was an eyewitness of the massacre. That May morning, he was supposed to speak at Portella. "But I got a bit late and before my eyes this horrific tragedy happened." Renda recalls that immediately after the massacre, the peasants of Piana wanted their own justice, threatening to kill the mafiosi of their county. "I convinced them," Renda remembered, "that that would have been the provocation needed to outlaw the Communists."[20]
In the arts
Film depictions
Salvatore Giuliano is a 1962 Italian film directed by Francesco Rosi. Shot in a neo-realist documentary, non-linear style, it follows the lives of those involved with Giuliano. When Rosi came to Sicily in 1961 to re-enact the Portella Della Ginestra sequence massacre for the film, the trauma from 14 years earlier was still fresh. He asked 1,000 peasants to go back and enact exactly what they, their friends and relatives had been through. Events nearly slipped out of control. When the gunfire sound effects started, the crowd panicked and knocked over one of the cameras in rush to escape; women wept and knelt in prayer; men threw themselves to the ground in agony. One old woman, dressed entirely in black, planted herself before the camera and repeated in an anguished wail, "Where are my children?" Two of her sons had died at the hands of Giuliano and his gang.[5]
The novel The Sicilian, a fictionalized take on the life of Giuliano by Mario Puzo, depicts the massacre.
Sicilian author and playwright Beatrice Monroy wrote a poem to commemorate the tragedy, "Portella della Ginestra: Indice dei nomi proibiti" (2005). She retells the massacre from the point of view of the victims and their feelings of despair and thirst for justice, as a song of sorrow for the downtrodden of the earth, and as a crime whose instigators are still officially unknown.[22][23]
Salvatore Giuliano was an Italian brigand, who rose to prominence in the disorder that followed the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943. In September of that year, Giuliano became an outlaw after shooting and killing a police officer who tried to arrest him for black market food smuggling, at a time when 70 percent of Sicily's food supply was provided by the black market. He maintained a band of subordinates for most of his career. He was a flamboyant, high-profile criminal, attacking the police at least as often as they sought him. In addition, he was a local power-broker in Sicilian politics between 1945 and 1948, including his role as a nominal colonel for the Movement for the Independence of Sicily. He and his band were held legally responsible for the Portella della Ginestra massacre, though there is some doubt about their role in the numerous deaths which occurred.
Mario Scelba was an Italian politician and statesman who was the 33rd prime minister of Italy from February 1954 to July 1955. A founder of Christian Democracy (DC), Scelba was one of the longest-serving Minister of the Interior in the history of the republic, having served at the Viminale Palace in three distinct terms from 1947 to 1962.
The Sicilian is a novel by American author Mario Puzo. Published in 1984 by Random House Publishing Group (ISBN 0-671-43564-7), it is based on the life of Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano. It is set in the same universe as Puzo's most famous work, The Godfather (1969), and contains characters from The Godfather. It is regarded as The Godfather's literary sequel and is the second book in The Godfather novel series. It was adapted into a film in 1987, though all Godfather references were removed for copyright reasons in the film adaptation.
Salvatore Giuliano is a 1962 Italian drama film directed by Francesco Rosi. Using techniques of the documentary film, it recounts the criminal career of famous Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano between 1943 and 1950, his death. In 2008, the film was included in the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage's 100 Italian films to be saved, a list of 100 films that "have changed the collective memory of the country between 1942 and 1978."
Leoluca Bagarella is an Italian criminal and member of the Sicilian Mafia. He is from the town of Corleone. Following Salvatore Riina's arrest in early 1993, Bagarella became the head of the strategist strategy faction, opposing another faction commanded by the successor designate Bernardo Provenzano, creating a real rift in Cosa Nostra. Bagarella was captured in 1995, having been a fugitive for four years, and sentenced to life imprisonment for Mafia association and multiple murders.
Ignazio Buttitta was an Italian poet who wrote predominantly in Sicilian.
Gaspare Pisciotta was a companion of the Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano, and considered to be the co-leader of his outlaw band. He is also the Judas in Giuliano's legend as he betrayed Giuliano and killed him.
Calogero Vizzini, also commonly known as "Don Calò", was a Sicilian Mafia boss of Villalba in the province of Caltanissetta, Sicily. He was considered to be one of the most influential and legendary Mafia bosses of Sicily after World War II until his death in 1954. In the media, Don Calò was often depicted as the "boss of bosses" – although such a position does not exist in the loose structure of Cosa Nostra.
Piana degli Albanesi, known as Piana dei Greci until 1941, is a town and comune in Sicily, Italy. The town is situated on a mountainous plateau and encircled by high mountains, on the eastern side of the imposing Mount Pizzuta, the city, which is mirrored on a large lake. It is located around 24 kilometres (15 mi) from Palermo and is administered as part of the Metropolitan City of Palermo. In 2018, the comune had a population of 6,128.
Bernardo Mattarella was an Italian politician for the Christian Democrat party. He was a cabinet minister of Italy several times, becoming one of the most important politicians of his generation.
Michele Pantaleone was a respected journalist and expert on the Sicilian Mafia and one of the first to shed light on the links between organized crime and political power.
The Antimafia Commission is a bicameral commission of the Italian Parliament, composed of members from the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate of the Republic. The first commission, formed in 1963, was established as a body of inquiry tasked with investigating the "phenomenon of the [Sicilian] Mafia". Subsequent commissions expanded their scope to investigate all "organized crime of the Mafia type", which included other major criminal organizations in Italy, such as the Camorra, the 'Ndrangheta, and the Sacra Corona Unita.
Girolamo Li Causi was an Italian politician and a leader of the Italian Communist Party who was a prominent figure in the struggle for land reform and against the Mafia in Sicily. He labelled large estates Sicily's central problem.
Pietro Scaglione was an Italian magistrate and Chief Prosecutor of Palermo, Sicily. He was killed by the Mafia in 1971.
Nicola Barbato was a Sicilian medical doctor, socialist, and politician. He was one of the national leaders of the Fasci Siciliani dei Lavoratori a popular movement of democratic and socialist inspiration in 1891–1894, and perhaps might have been the ablest among them according to the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm.
Francesco Cuccia, also known as Don Ciccio, was a member of the Sicilian Mafia and one-time mayor of Piana dei Greci. He is best known as the Mafia boss who triggered Benito Mussolini’s war on the Mafia, after humiliating him while visiting Piana dei Greci in 1924. He was described by the writer Norman Lewis as a Mafia potentate with an inflamed sense of his own importance. The Sicilian writer Giuseppe Passarello called him "Cuccia il sanguinario".
Salvatore Giuliano is an opera in one act by Lorenzo Ferrero to an Italian-language libretto by Giuseppe Di Leva, which was conceived to be performed in tandem with Pietro Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana. The work was commissioned by the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma and premiered there on 25 January 1986.
Francesco Renda was an Italian Marxist historian, Communist politician and a university professor.
Giuseppe Casarrubea was an Italian historian and author.
(in Italian) Petrotta, Francesco (2010). La strage e i depistaggi: Il castello d'ombre su Portella della Ginestra, Rome: Ediesse, ISBN978-88-230-1396-4
Servadio, Gaia (1976), Mafioso. A history of the Mafia from its origins to the present day, London: Secker & Warburg ISBN0-436-44700-2
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