The Rise Of The National Conservative Right Under Giorgia Meloni

 

 

 

Italy ​ is often thought of as a political laboratory, anticipating events in other countries: fascism in the 1920s; the showman-businessman turned politician in the 1990s; populism in the 2010s. Great significance has been attributed to the government of Giorgia Meloni, who became prime minister in 2022. For some, it signals the return of fascism in a novel form; for the majority of pundits and, increasingly, politicians, it suggests that the far right can become more moderate when in power. Both views are misleading. While Meloni has proved to be shrewd on the national and the international stage, she is also operating in a country where the normalisation of the far right has been advancing for decades.

Italy after the Second World War had a unique political landscape. It was home to both the most powerful communist party in Western Europe and the most successful right-wing parties that openly identified with a fascist forebear. Communists were always excluded from power at national level, but the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), formed in 1946, was also outside the arco costituzionale. (In fact, a capacious reading of the 1948 constitution, which prohibited the refounding of the Fascist Party, could have resulted in the MSI being banned.) It brought together Italians nostalgic for fascism – whether for the early days of fighting or the paternalist modernisation drives of the 1930s – as well as those mourning the abolition of the monarchy following a referendum in 1946. The party’s flame symbol was widely understood as referring to the eternal fiamma above Mussolini’s sarcophagus in his home town of Predappio. The letters MSI could be read as M for Mussolini followed by ‘sì!’, as an abbreviation of his name, or as an allusion to the puppet regime set up by the Nazis after 1943 and nominally led by him: the Repubblica Sociale Italiana, better known as the Republic of Salò. The MSI’s founder, Giorgio Almirante, was a veteran of Salò and editorial secretary of Difesa della Razza during the ventennio, the twenty dark years of fascism.

In the 1950s MSI leaders, pursuing the strategy of inserimento, tried to present the movement as a legitimate partner for other parties. The Christian Democrats, who were in government continuously from 1948 until the early 1990s, relied on its support only once, in 1960, prompting widespread protests that forced the resignation of the prime minister, Fernando Tambroni. The postwar anti-fascist consensus seemed to hold across the major political divides, but the Tangentopoli corruption scandals of the early 1990s led to the collapse of what is now called the First Republic. The only parties left untainted were those that had been excluded from government: the MSI and the successors to the Communist Party, which had been dissolved in 1991. By that time, a dapper young man, Gianfranco Fini, had replaced Almirante as leader of the MSI. Fini promised to rejuvenate ‘fascism for the year 2000’, which didn’t stop Berlusconi from endorsing him when he ran for mayor of Rome in 1993. This was the first and, in retrospect, decisive stage in the normalisation of the Italian far right. Berlusconi soon decided to form his own party, Forza Italia, conceived by his companies’ marketing departments and modelled on a football supporters’ club – a move motivated, above all, by his desire to use public office to keep himself out of prison.

An unlikely alliance brought Berlusconi to power in 1994. In the north he partnered with the secessionist Lega Nord, whose founder, Umberto Bossi, said that it was ‘the party of those seeking to continue the partisans’ struggle of liberation against the partitocracy. Never with the fascists!’ In the south he partnered with the MSI, the fascists Bossi condemned. Berlusconi’s government lasted just eight months, but the missini had been brought into the system for good. In 1995 they renamed themselves the Alleanza Nazionale. The AN’s strategy was to distance itself from the ventennio while simultaneously trying to discredit the postwar anti-fascist consensus (as so often, the right portrayed itself as a victim – in this instance of self-righteous communists, or what Meloni today calls the ‘anti-Italian left’). Fini was still prone to making occasional statements such as ‘Berlusconi will have to work hard to prove that he can make history like Mussolini.’ But he stopped addressing people as camerata and announced that his party was not neofascist, but post-fascist – like all Italians, he said, since fascism constituted their collective heritage.

Fini’s gestures towards moderation culminated in a 2003 visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial centre in Jerusalem, where, wearing a kippa, he declared that fascism had been an ‘absolute evil’. That same year he floated the idea of giving voting rights to immigrants. For hardliners this was too much; Alessandra Mussolini claimed that Fini was betraying her grandfather’s legacy and left the party. In another sign of his new-found respectability, Fini became president of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house, in 2008. The next year the AN was absorbed into the Popolo della Libertà (PdL), co-founded by Fini and Berlusconi. Soon after the merger, Fini accused Berlusconi of having moved too far to the right and founded a new party, Futuro e Libertà per l’Italia (FLI), which failed miserably at the polls. Berlusconi used the power of his media empire to hound Fini out of politics. Fini had hoped that the PdL’s most talented young politician would follow him into FLI. But Giorgia Meloni stuck with Berlusconi.

Meloni was born in a bourgeois neighbourhood in Rome in 1977. Her mother was on the right; her father had left-wing sympathies. He abandoned the family when Meloni was one, an experience she credits with making her tough. A few years later, according to a much repeated story, she and her sister accidentally set fire to the family apartment, forcing her mother to sell up and move to the working-class neighbourhood of Garbatella. Meloni has made much of the hardships of her youth. (Her autobiography, Io sono Giorgia, sold 150,000 copies in its first year, an unusually large number for an Italian politician.) As a teenager she was bullied for being overweight. While her mother made a living by churning out more than a hundred romanzi rosa under the pseudonym ‘Josie Bell’, Meloni took on jobs from babysitting to working behind the bar at the Rome nightclub Piper. She studied languages at a tourism school, setting her up for her assured appearances on the international stage: perfect, impassioned Spanish when giving a speech against LGBTQ rights in Marbella; perfect, nuanced English when paying tribute to the political philosophy of self-declared Burkean ‘national conservatives’.

At fifteen, Meloni joined the Fronte della Gioventù, the MSI’s youth organisation. She became leader of the AN’s student wing four years later. These youth organisations were more radical than the mother parties, more open in their worship of Mussolini, and didn’t shy away from violence – they were also themselves subject to violence from the left, which created martyrs still celebrated today. A French TV report on the 1996 election shows Meloni organising a group of young activists, almost all men, in Garbatella. Wearing a black leather jacket, she tells the reporter in passable French that Mussolini had been a good politician because everything he did had been for Italy. Later in the clip, she appears under a poster declaring Mussolini ‘uomo del popolo’. Two years later she was elected as a councillor in Rome; that same year she founded the Atreju Festival, named after one of the heroes in Michael Ende’s fantasy novel The Neverending Story, an enduring influence alongside Tolkien (MSI activists had set up a Camp Hobbit in 1977). The festival continues to be held, featuring international stars of the far right from Steve Bannon to Viktor Orbán and inevitably – or so it feels nowadays – Elon Musk.

By 2004 Meloni had been elected president of the AN’s youth wing, the first woman to lead any such political organisation in Italy. She entered parliament two years later and was soon appointed vice president of the Chamber of Deputies; she also joined Berlusconi’s cabinet as minister for youth, making her the youngest minister in Italian history. When a clearly fading Berlusconi cancelled the PdL primaries and declared himself prime ministerial candidate in the 2013 election, Meloni quit the party alongside Ignazio La Russa, an MSI veteran. They founded Fratelli d’Italia (FdI), taking its name from the beginning of the Italian national anthem. The party won 2 per cent of votes in the election, ending up with nine deputies.

The following year Meloni took over the leadership of the party from La Russa (today he is president of the Senate and occasionally boasts about the Mussolini busts in his living room). She was re-elected in 2017 by delegates to the party congress, without a vote from FdI members. As the political scientists Salvatore Vassallo and Rinaldo Vignati stress in their illuminating book, which was called Fratelli di Giorgia in the Italian edition, the FdI is extraordinarily centralised, and its rules about internal democracy – fairly weak in any case, given the absence of a proper law on political parties in Italy – are mostly ignored. Key positions are held by figures who joined the MSI in the early 1990s; there are no real factions or infighting.

The guest of honour at the 2014 party congress where Meloni became leader was Almirante’s widow, Assunta. Meloni herself insisted at the congress that she would ‘never presume to be on the same level as Giorgio Almirante’. Soon afterwards the FdI obtained the rights to use the MSI’s flame, which had appeared in the AN’s logo but not the PdL’s. ‘The flame remains to recall our genesis,’ Meloni declared, ‘but with an eye on the future.’ Yet, as Vassallo and Vignati write, at first the party’s programme didn’t diverge greatly from Berlusconi’s (it even included elements of Catholic social thought, the legacy of the once dominant Christian Democrats having been scattered across the political landscape). It wasn’t long, however, before Meloni made a decisive turn to far-right populism, with its predictable features: nativism, Euroscepticism and an identitarian view of Christianity (as she writes in Io sono Giorgia, ‘the Christian identity can be secular rather than religious’). In other respects, the ideological mix was less conventional. At the party’s 2013 gathering in Rome, images of John Paul II, Thatcher, Gandhi and Mother Teresa were projected beside those of bona fide fathers of fascism such as D’Annunzio and Marinetti. The 2022 congress displayed cardboard cut-outs of Hannah Arendt, the Fellini collaborator Ennio Flaiano and Pasolini, whom the FdI has claimed as a conservative. The official line became that the party wasn’t post-fascist, but afascist – another not so subtle distancing from the anti-fascism of the First Republic.

The FdI doubled its vote share in the 2018 election but was overshadowed by the triumph of Matteo Salvini’s Lega (which had dropped the ‘Nord’) as well as the strong showing of the Five Star Movement (M5S). Salvini had abandoned Bossi’s secessionist agenda and even apologised for the Lega’s comments about southerners. He was appointed interior minister of an incongruous coalition between what were often described as right-wing populists and left-wing populists, headed by an independent, Giuseppe Conte. Salvini’s draconian measures against migrants ended up dominating the headlines. In the summer of 2019, with the Lega leading the polls, he overplayed his hand by leaving the coalition. He had intended to trigger an election; instead, President Sergio Mattarella brokered a coalition between the M5S and the centre-left, followed in 2021 by a coalition of almost all the parties, headed by Mario Draghi, the former president of the European Central Bank.

Vassallo and Vignati argue that conventional accounts of FdI’s success in the 2022 election need to be treated with caution. It was in 2019, they point out, that the Fratelli began rising in the polls. Still, some of the commonly cited factors were surely relevant. Meloni followed the path beaten by Berlusconi when her fiery speech at a rally for ‘Italian pride’ in 2019 – ‘I am a woman, a mother, an Italian and a Christian ... you won’t take it away from me!’ – was turned into a techno song. What had been intended as an attack on her became a wildly popular meme. Far more important, the Fratelli was the only party that didn’t join Draghi’s coalition in 2021 (Meloni said that ‘North Korean conditions’ had to be resisted). As the only source of opposition, she was well placed to capitalise on discontent with anti-Covid measures, which were especially tough in Italy after the traumatic experiences of places such as Bergamo.

Also significant was Meloni’s decision to tone down her anti-EU rhetoric in the run-up to the 2022 election. In 2017 the FdI had called for a ‘controlled abandonment of the Eurozone’ and for Southern Europe to be compensated for its suffering during the Eurocrisis. But following the agreement in 2021 of a €191 billion package for Italy as part of Brussels’s post-pandemic Recovery and Resilience Facility, it was clear that maintaining a hostile stance towards the EU would be political suicide. Meloni, in other words, profited from what is now often called ‘anti-incumbency’ sentiment and then, once in power, from access to the money her predecessors had negotiated (never mind that Italy might not have the administrative capacity to spend it all).

When the Fratelli first entered the European Parliament, they joined the European Conservatives and Reformists (in part because the Lega was already in another far-right grouping). The ECR had been the creature of the Tories since David Cameron turned his back on the mainstream conservative European Peoples Party (EPP), historically the driving force of European integration. But Brexit meant that the Conservatives didn’t contest the 2019 European election. This was another stroke of luck for Meloni: a savvy member of the FdI positioned her as the new leader of the group, which helped her appear to be centre-right – even if far-right parties such as Poland’s Law and Justice, Spain’s Vox and the Sweden Democrats are ECR members. She has often said that were she British, she’d be a Tory.

 

 

Her victory in 2022 led to warnings about a ‘rebirth of fascism’, but Meloni didn’t have to do much to prove the pundits and left-wing politicians wrong. In contrast to Salvini, who has a long history of pro-Putin statements, she supported Ukraine. She also made overtures to Ursula von der Leyen about working together on migration, a strategy that has resulted in the EU’s paying €255 million to Tunisia’s authoritarian, openly racist president, Kais Saied. While the number of people entering Italy actually increased during Meloni’s first year in office, it fell by more than half in 2024. Tweaks to the law have made it more difficult for NGOs to operate in the Mediterranean: they can carry out only one rescue operation before they must return to port, and are only allowed to use ports in the north. Italian judges blocked Meloni’s plan, backed by von der Leyen, to ship asylum seekers to Albania, where Italy has built detention centres that can hold up to three thousand; she responded by removing the case from the jurisdiction of the judges, and in January an Italian navy vessel transported 49 migrants to the centres.

The story of the FdI tends to be subsumed by the conventional wisdom that a ‘wave of populism’ is washing over Europe. But the strategy of doubling down on far-right rhetoric originated with Berlusconi. By 2022, the EPP leader, Manfred Weber, was appealing to Berlusconi as a reliable centre-right leader who would rein in the post-fascist upstarts; few seemed to recall that in the late 1990s the EPP had refused to admit Forza Italia because it was clearly a right-wing populist party. Berlusconi was also the first prime minister to include in his cabinet a veteran of Salò, Mirko Tremaglia, euphemistically referred to as ‘l’ultimo ragazzo di Salò’. What looks like a dramatic win for the post-fascists has in fact been a result of major movement within the right-wing bloc: the right as a whole won a greater share of votes in the 2008 general election than in 2022. The simple fact is that the Italian right, unlike the left, has always managed to come together for elections, with the exception of 1996. At the same time, competition between parties has provided an incentive to push ever further right within the bloc: when a reporter suggested to Meloni that Salvini was more right-wing than she was, she responded that ‘no one is further right than me.’

Vassallo​  and Vignati concede that the FdI is characterised by nativism and populism, and recognise that it is now the ‘third party of the flame’ (after the MSI and the AN). Yet they reject the ‘fascist’ label. In their view, the FdI is Italy’s first genuinely ‘national conservative’ party. It’s true that the kind of culture war Meloni has been waging is no longer alien to the centre-right. She vilifies the ‘LGBTQ lobby’ and has passed a law making it illegal to have a child through surrogacy outside the country (it has never been legal inside Italy). She also keeps insinuating that the ‘armed left’ is in cahoots with the multinationals and the grande finanza whose agenda is to destroy all local identities. According to one of Meloni’s ministers – who happens to be the former partner of her sister, Arianna, the party secretary – the aim is nothing less than the ‘ethnic substitution’ of real Italians. (This is where Atreju comes in: the hero of The Neverending Story fought against the forces of the Nothing, shorthand for the eradication of identity.) Meloni says she opposes abortion because her mother came close to having one when pregnant with her; she has claimed that the multinational forces of the ‘indistinct’ have as their ‘real, unstated, goal ... the disappearance of women as mothers’. This rhetoric is all the more charged because the leader of the opposition, the Democratic Party’s Elly Schlein, has a female partner. (‘I am a woman,’ Schlein shot back, ‘I love another woman, and I am not a mother. But that does not make me any less of a woman.’)

 

 

Italy is 87th in the global rankings for gender equality. The few women in Meloni’s cabinet have posts traditionally associated with women, such as the renamed ministra per la famiglia, la natalità e le pari opportunità. Meloni has also made a point of being addressed with the male article as ‘il presidente del consiglio’. She dismisses feminism as ‘a left-wing ideology harmful to women because it advocates for gender quotas in candidate selection and the introduction of gender ideology into schools’. Her government has increased support for working mothers and, in the vein of other natalists like Orbán, tax relief for large families. Yet despite the incessant invocations of ‘Dio-Patria-Famiglia’, the birth rate has fallen to a historic low.

Meanwhile, pro-market rhetoric and calls for lower taxes – so far, all talk and no action – have been combined with unashamed clientelism. The balneari, who hold ludicrously cheap concessions to operate twelve thousand lidos along the eight thousand kilometres of Italy’s coastline, have been sheltered from EU attempts to create more competition. The signature legislation of the M5S, the reddito di cittadinanza, has been repealed. Sometimes mischaracterised as basic income, it was essentially a modest social benefit of €750 per month for the worst-off – four million people in total, two-thirds of them in the south. Meloni claimed it had mostly gone to migrants or was ‘pocket money’ that kept healthy 25-year-olds from getting a job.

When economic miracles don’t happen, the right resorts to culture war. Previous governments tried to place partisans in cultural institutions; it was the former Democratic Party prime minister Matteo Renzi, a populist manqué, who gave the government the power to appoint the head of RAI, the public broadcaster. But changes at RAI have been so rapid and thorough that it’s now derided as ‘TeleMeloni’; RAI journalists went on strike last year over the government’s ‘suffocating control’. Even more ominous, Meloni sued Roberto Saviano, the author of Gomorrah, for libel after he called her and Salvini ‘bastards’ following the sinking of a boat of migrants. He was found guilty in 2023 and ordered to pay a fine. Meloni and her lieutenants have also tried to claim large chunks of traditional Italian culture: her former culture minister, Gennaro Sangiuliano, hailed Dante as the father of right-wing thought.

 

 

Since coming to power Meloni has made aggressive use of decrees and votes of confidence to keep members of her coalition in line. But she has also promoted a long-standing goal of the MSI and the AN: the introduction of a presidential system. (At present the president is a nominally neutral figurehead appointed by parliament.) She isn’t the first person to point out that it’s dysfunctional to have two legislative chambers with equal power. But her solution is for the prime minister to be elected by a direct vote. Such a system has only been tried once before, in Israel from 1996 to 2001. No one considers that experiment a success.

Under Meloni’s proposals, which were approved by the Senate last June, the coalition that backed the winning candidate would also automatically obtain 55 per cent of seats in parliament. It’s unclear whether these changes will happen. If the bill fails to get a two-thirds majority in both chambers, as seems likely, the reform will have to be put to a referendum; such votes often become occasions to voice discontent with the sitting government. It’s equally unclear how far Meloni will go in resisting EU regulations in Italy. She is promising to follow the model of the Polish far right by having the judiciary determine whether regulations are compatible with ‘principles of sovereignty and democracy’. Such national checks would be the end of the EU as a supranational enterprise.

For a while, Meloni looked like she might become a de facto leader of that enterprise: close to Trump and especially Elon Musk (to whose Starlink system she has been trying to commit Italy), the only European head of government at the inauguration, she promised to be the bridge between Europe and the second Trump administration. Speaking at the American far right’s major annual gathering, CPAC, in February, she implored her audience not to consider Europe ‘lost’ and to defend the ‘West’ from the ‘globalist’ left that hates freedom and distrusts its own people – echoing J.D. Vance’s incendiary rhetoric at the Munich Security Conference. But she also sent a message to Trump, stressing the need for a ‘just and lasting peace for Ukraine’ and warning of ‘trade clashes’ that would play into the hands of non-Western powers.

Trump’s apparent realignment with Putin has made her transatlantic balancing act much more precarious. Salvini, seeing an opening to reassert himself, has come out blazing for MAGA geopolitics; meanwhile, Meloni has stuck with her support for Ukraine, but also made it clear that there will be no Italian troops on the ground there (Italy’s military spending is far below the 2 per cent of GDP to which Nato members are officially committed). Her calls to keep the West together now sound desperate; she has had to cede the European stage to Starmer and Macron.

In retrospect, the 2022 election may have marked the end of a period of exceptional electoral volatility, during which a tripolar political system seemed to be emerging. It was Salvini who brought voters with populist inclinations back from the M5S to the right, while the M5S itself has moved to the left (while refusing that label), restoring a bipolar system. Interestingly, there is no longer any real north-south divide within the FdI electorate – a significant difference with the MSI, which was always much more popular below the Gothic Line.

Does that mean Vassallo and Vignati are right to see the Fratelli d’Italia as a genuinely national and more or less normal conservative party? It depends on whether one finds it normal that the leader of the party tweets about Soros being a ‘usurer’, that the party’s youth wing enthusiastically read the works of the interwar fascist philosopher Julius Evola, and that, every so often, someone in the party brings up the spectre of ‘ethnic substitution’. But for many on the centre-right in Western Europe today, such things are no longer abnormal.

No One Is Further Right Than Me. By Jan-Werner Müller.  London Review of Books, March 20, 2025.

 

 

 

 

 

Letizia Battaglia : The Sicilian Photographer Who Fought the Mafia

 

“You seem like such a nice girl,” Letizia kept faxing back to me—always evasive and never, ever answering my usually welcome question: “Are you interested in working with me on a book for Aperture?”
 
Letizia Battaglia died on April 13, 2022, in Cefalù, near Palermo, Italy. She was eighty-seven. I first saw Letizia’s work exposing the Mafia’s oppressive, unrelentingly brutal grip on her native Sicily while working at Aperture Foundation, editing various issues of their quarterly publication, as well as books. At this time, the early to mid-1990s, Letizia was little known in the United States outside photojournalistic circles. In 1985, she had won the coveted W. Eugene Smith Fund Grant for humanistic photography, sharing it with Donna Ferrato—the first time two winners had been named. Then, in May 1986, the New York Times Magazine, in an article titled “Sicily and the Mafia,” published a selection of Letizia’s and Franco Zecchin’s images. Some of the most iconic became forever embedded in the mind’s eye of many—although both photographers were still relatively unknown.

 
When I decided to devote an issue of Aperture to Italian photography, Immagini Italiane (1993), we included Letizia’s work, accompanied by an interview with the wonderful Italian editor and writer Giovanna Calvenzi, who in 2010 would author Letizia Battaglia: Sulle ferite dei suoi sogni (On the wounds of her dreams). I thought Letizia was pleased, and I was fairly certain she had gone to see and liked the traveling exhibition we did in conjunction with the issue in Venice, where it opened at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, or in Naples, where it was presented at Museo Diego Aragona Pignatelli Cortes. So why wasn’t she responding “yes” to my book entreaty, or at least acknowledging the question? This was her M.O., I would come to learn, but at the time I was flummoxed—it had become personal.
 
So, in 1994, I took the long way to Naples, where I had a project, and stopped in Palermo. Letizia saw me for maybe an hour. She showed me not one photograph. We sat in her home, in Palermo’s wonderful old center (I would soon learn that she and others helped to save it from Mafia-plotted destruction), and we shared an espresso together. Still, when I left, I was frustrated and bewildered, not to mention empty-handed. She had promised to send me a package. Yeah, sure: the check was in the mail.
 
But, wow—I was nonetheless blown away by her. Her fierce intensity felt almost feral. The proverbial force of nature and then some. And not only as a photographer  but also as a publisher, Green Party member with the Palermo city council, ecological activist, and defender of women’s and of human rights. We spoke about women, we spoke about justice, she asked me personal questions—not my forte, as I’m so private, but she was like truth serum. I soon understood I was being tested. That she was naturally suspicious. But our conversation was somehow instantly intimate. From that moment on, there was this extraordinary, powerful woman in my life who declared herself my sister, who could get annoyed with me, and who demanded a kind of complicity.
 
That package bursting with prints, most with handwritten Italian captions scribbled on the backs, arrived two weeks later. Her work took my breath away, as it did for Aperture’s director and publisher at the time, Michael Hoffman. It wasn’t just the photographs’ visual power, or Letizia’s clear commitment to bearing witness to the horrific violence plaguing her city, especially as it affected women and children. It was her all-in engagement, her toughness, her advocacy, her profound sense of justice. Her passion.

 
And so our story began, as she would only agree to collaborate on the book if I would write the accompanying essay about her that I had asserted was crucial. In this way, I would be invested not just as the book’s editor, but also as the person to whom she would tell her story in words. Of course, I accepted her challenge. Letizia Battaglia: Passion, Justice, Freedom—Photographs of Sicily was published by Aperture in 1999. I have chosen to quote many of her words from the book here, adding context when useful, as Letizia spoke so ardently and persuasively about what mattered to her.
 
Letizia was born in Palermo on March 5, 1935. Her father was in the navy and they moved around Italy. She spent much of her childhood in Trieste, in the north, and was ten when her family moved back to Palermo. At first she sought freedom by marrying an older man, and with him she had three daughters: Cinzia, Shobha (also a photographer), and Patrizia. But she became desperately unhappy and claustrophobic. She credited the Freudian psychoanalyst Francesco Corrao with helping her to understand that she was strong, telling her, “You can make your own peace, your own equilibrium. You can rebuild your life and save yourself.”
 
This gave her the strength to leave her husband in 1971, at age thirty-six. She went to Milan and began writing for a newspaper there, while also continuing to write for the left-wing Sicilian daily newspaper L’Ora, as she had done for the previous two years. She had always wanted to be a writer, to tell stories. She soon realized that she’d have more success selling her articles if they were accompanied by images, and so she began making photographs. Very quickly, she just wanted to take pictures. After she had done a small photographic job for L’Ora, the paper asked her to return to Palermo as its director of photography, and she became a full-time photographer. “I think that my life truly began with my camera,” she told me. “I mean my freedom as a person, my voice.” Diane Arbus, Josef Koudelka, Mary Ellen Mark, and Eugene Richards were the photographers whose work she especially admired.

 
In 1975, she traveled to Venice to see Jerzy Grotowski’s Apocalypsis cum Figuris and met members of his Theatre of Participation. Eventually she ended up working with them, and that’s where she met the twenty-two-year-old Franco Zecchin, who would become her partner in work and life over the next two decades. During our conversations, which took place between 1996 and 1998, she described how their “beautiful story” began:
 
“We spent our first . . . what would you call it . . . encounter on a floor full of dry leaves, because Grotowski was pushing to create things with nature. . . . Bit by bit, we got down in the leaves and began to know each other. After that, I returned to Palermo, and Franco returned to Milan—but then he came to Palermo and stayed for nineteen years. We experienced some very dramatic things together, and accomplished many positive things as well, including our work against the Mafia. Franco was not Sicilian, so it was different for him. He completely understood, but it was more of an intellectual fight for him, whereas for me it was my home, my people, who were so threatened. Besides, I am incapable of elaborating on an intellectual idea with the camera. I live life with the camera. The camera is like a piece of my heart, an extension of my intuition, my sensitivity. . . .
 
I was bare-handed, except for my camera, against them with all of their weapons. I took pictures of everything. Suddenly I had an archive of blood. An archive of pain, of desperation, of terror, of young people on drugs, of young widows, of trials and arrests. There in my house, Franco Zecchin and I were surrounded by the dead, the murdered. It was like being in the middle of a revolution. I was so afraid.”
 
One of Letizia’s and Zecchin’s most provocative and risky actions was displaying large-scale prints of their images of Mafia victims in Corleone’s main piazza. Letizia was desperate for her fellow Sicilians to truly understand the Mafia’s barbarity, and to speak up and out against them, despite her understandable fear. The acute brilliance of her reportage was always intertwined heart and soul with her activism.

 
Letizia’s own performative nature and instinct to take it to the streets eventually led her to enter politics. She met Mayor Leoluca Orlando when she was first elected to Palermo’s Municipal Council in 1985; although they were not predisposed toward working together, they soon completely accepted, trusted, and respected each other—especially once Letizia understood that he was “ferociously anti-Mafia, and also much more progressive than I was at the time on issues of the environment, for example.” They ultimately became close collaborators and friends, and Orlando poetically expressed his appreciation for Letizia’s heart, mind, and willfulness in a letter to her, written for our book.
 
About her work in politics, Letizia told me:
 
“When I stopped taking pictures and entered politics—first as municipal councilwoman, then as regional deputy, and lastly as municipal councilwoman again—I was afraid I had betrayed photography, and maybe even the struggle, since I had felt that taking pictures was my only weapon. But then I realized that the same motivation lies behind my photography and my politics, the same will to combat, to stay on the front line. Working in a different way, I could accomplish different things. So, despite many difficult times, we continued into the eighties with our politics, photography, publishing, meetings, and anti-Mafia demonstrations. And then came those wonderful men who gave us such hope—Judge Giovanni Falcone, Judge Paolo Borsellino—prosecutors who were good and brave; and who then, in 1992, were murdered.”
 
Another contributor to the book Passion, Justice, Freedom was Magistrate Roberto Scarpinato, who at the time was prosecuting Italy’s ex–prime minister Giulio Andreotti for collusion with the Mafia—and using one of Letizia’s photographs as evidence. Also writing for our book and discussing this image, along with her work in general, was journalist Alexander Stille, author of Excellent Cadavers (1995), which insightfully chronicles the violence and workings of the Sicilian Mafia in light of the assassinations of Falcone and Borsellino. In 2005, when Marco Turco turned Excellent Cadavers into a film, Letizia’s commanding presence throughout was electrifying.
 
Letizia’s approach was one of advocacy and empowerment, especially of women, on the most human and humane level. In Palermo she started a women’s theater project, and when she began her publishing house the initial idea was to give women (although not exclusively women) a place to be heard, a platform. The principal motivation for these books was desperation after the murders of Falcone and Borsellino, but Edizioni della battaglia soon embraced talented voices and addressed the struggle for human rights worldwide. In time, Mayor Orlando assigned her a counseling position to work with prisoners in Palermo: “It’s necessary,” she told me, “to work for justice but also to help those who have made mistakes to transform their lives.”  She and Zecchin also set up a photography school and volunteered in the psychiatric hospital in Palermo, working with the patients. Around 2013, Letizia told me about the photography center she had conceived for Palermo: Il Centro Internazionale di Fotografia—Cantieri culturali alla Zisa. She asked if I’d curate one of the first exhibitions; she wanted a show of American women photographers. And, would I please include Mary Ellen Mark? Mary Ellen, who died in 2015, consented without hesitation. “For Letizia.”
 

In the summer of 2015, I received an email from Letizia further describing the center. Mayor Orlando had provided funding to restore the building, “but there will be no money for anything else. . . . I need the help of many,” she wrote. “I need photographers who will give me photographs to exhibit at no cost. Everyone must know that I have much respect for the photographs and photographers. This is a heroic operation, because it was born in Palermo, still the powerful city of the Mafia. Whoever helps me has to do it by faith.”
 
I sent a rough translation to Nina Berman, Lynsey Addario, Donna Ferrato, Graciela Iturbide, Mary Ellen Mark’s studio, Susan Meiselas, Sylvia Plachy, and Stephanie Sinclair. These remarkable photographers joined forces with me (as did designer Yolanda Cuomo and translator Meg Shore). The 2018 show, Donne Fotografano Donne (Women Photograph Women), was born. Letizia was profoundly moved by their generosity of spirit and the support of her community. She understood that this exhibition came about because of the woman and photographer we all understood her to be. This spring, Mayor Orlando announced that the Palermo photography center would be renamed in her honor.
 
The Sicilian Photographer Who Fought the Mafia :  An impassioned activist and fearless documentarian, Letizia Battaglia lived by the heart and the camera. By Melissa Harris. Aperture , May 5, 2022. 

When Italian photographer Letizia Battaglia passed away on April 13, 2022, the biggest shock among those of us who have written about her was that she didn’t die at the hands of the Mafia.

 
For nearly five decades she fearlessly fought the criminal enterprise. Armed with her 35mm camera, she publicized the Sicilian Mafia’s reign of terror with her photographs of the bullet-riddled bodies of public servants, innocent bystanders and mafiosi. She later worked as a politician and local activist to wrest Palermo’s streets and piazzas from the Mafia’s grip.
 
Exposing the Mafia’s culture of death
 
Battaglia earned international acclaim for her photographs of Sicily – images that captured the island’s beauty, poverty, spirit and, perhaps most famously, violence.
 
Her first years working as a photojournalist at Palermo’s daily newspaper, L’Ora, coincided with the first Mafia murders of public figures in the 1970s and the years of the Second Mafia War in the 1980s, which was simply known as “the slaughter.”
 
The struggle over power and profits pitted the rural clan of Corleone, led by Salvatore Riina, against key clans operating in Palermo, the capital of Sicily. During the conflict, machine gun fire and car bomb explosions became commonplace in Palermo and outlying cities.
 
The politicians in Rome responded to the national crisis by asking General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa to become the prefect of Palermo. After spending four months restoring order, Dalla Chiesa, his wife, Emanuela Setti Carraro, and police bodyguard Domenico Russo were murdered in a spray of machine-gun fire on September 3, 1982 – what became known as the Via Carini Massacre. Dalla Chiesa’s death, along with hits on police chiefs, public prosecutors and investigators, left honest citizens feeling hopeless and abandoned.
 
Some days Battaglia would rush from one city to another to photograph several dead bodies – of mafiosi, judges, police, political figures and journalists – “so much blood,” she later recalled.
 
Mafia murders became so commonplace – some 600 between 1981 and 1983 alone – that she sometimes came upon crime scenes by chance.
 
Such was the case with her famous photograph of the corpse of Piersanti Mattarella, the former president of the Region of Sicily. On Jan. 6, 1980, while riding in the car with her daughter and fellow photojournalist Franco Zecchin, Battaglia saw a small group of people gathering around a car. She spontaneously snapped shots from the car window, capturing Sergio Mattarella, the current President of Italy, as he attempted to help his brother, who had been shot in an ambush.
 
 
The Palermo Spring
 
Battaglia’s photographs of Mafia violence were published regularly on the front page of L’Ora. She also displayed large format prints of them at pop-up exhibits that she and Zecchin organized in downtown Palermo and local schools.
 
In doing so, she forced people to face what they had disavowed: that the Mafia existed, and that it killed.
 
Of course, most Sicilians had been aware of the crime organization’s influence. They watched the public parks become overrun by drug dealers, and tiptoed around used syringes dotting the sandy beaches. Some 80% of Palermo businesses regularly paid the “pizzo,” or money demanded by the Mafia to protect businesses from the Mafia’s own violence.
 
But Battaglia’s images of bloodshed made it impossible to continue turning a blind eye, and a shift gradually occurred.
 
Beginning in 1983, an anti-Mafia pool of prosecutors and uncompromised police officers started arresting numerous Mafia members. Over 450 of them were eventually put on trial in the famous Maxi-trial, which began in 1986.
 
With public confidence in the justice system bolstered, a social, cultural and political revolution took place between 1985 and 1990. Everyday people and new members of the city council started directly confronting the Mafia and working to loosen its grip on the region. It became known as the “Palermo Spring,” and Battaglia was a driving force behind it.
 
In 1985, she was elected as a council member. Together with the mayor, Leoluca Orlando, who appointed her Commissioner for Gardens and Public Life, Battaglia worked to stop the Mafia’s decadeslong sacking of Palermo. Mafia leaders and their political allies had let schools, historic palazzos and gardens fall into disrepair, with the intent of eventually razing the downtown neighborhoods and making windfall profits in reconstruction.
 
Battaglia was driven by the conviction that providing all citizens free access to spectacular gardens, parks, beaches and historical sites was essential for creating a culture of respect and appreciation for Palermo and its heritage. Through her projects to make Palermo more beautiful and livable, Battaglia reclaimed Mafia-controlled spaces block by block. She worked with fellow members of the city council on undertakings such as removing abandoned cars, creating a downtown pedestrian mall and restoring public gardens to their original beauty.
 
On streets and in piazzas controlled by clan bosses, where a glance or wrong word can represent an offense worthy of violent retaliation, Battaglia’s acts directly challenged the bosses. But public support soon coalesced behind Battaglia and her allies.
 
One instance is especially memorable. After having mountains of garbage hauled away from the beach near Foro Italica near the Kalsa neighborhood, which was famous for its high concentration of powerful mafiosi, she had some benches for enjoying the view bolted into the cement. The next day they were gone.
 
Journalist Antonio Roccuzzo was with Battaglia. He recalled how she went straight to the neighborhood and shouted, “I know who you are. The benches don’t belong to you. They belong to everyone. If all of you don’t put them back within the hour, I’m going to raise hell!”
 
An hour later, the benches were bolted back in place.
 
Keeping an invisible Mafia in the public eye
 
In 1992 and 1993, a series of bombings took the lives of Judges Giovanni Falcone, renowned architect of the Maxi-trial; Francesca Morvillo, a prosecutor in the juvenile court of Palermo and his wife; and Paolo Borsellino, who had worked closely with Falcone and investigated his murder. Bodyguards and bystanders in Sicily, Rome, Milan and Florence also perished.
 
With these bombings, known as the “strategy of massacres,” the Mafia attacked the state’s symbols of justice, government, finance and culture. Their goal was to intimidate politicians into weakening laws against organized crime.
 
However, the violence elicited even more public backlash, and the criminal organization soon adopted the strategy of going underground and quietly carrying on its diversified criminal activities. This shift marked a departure from spectacular bombings, brazen assassinations and shootouts in city streets.
 
Yet the menace of the Mafia still remains. Their murder victims now die mostly by “lupara bianca” – with any trace of their bodies destroyed by fire or acid.
 
In the absence of visible evidence, Battaglia’s shots documenting Mafia bloodshed and bereavement continue doing the work of keeping the ramifications of Mafia violence in the public eye.

 
These painful images have also become vehicles for expressing hope. In a project Battaglia began in 2004, known as “Rielaborazioni” – or “Re-elaborations” – she takes the original images of violent deaths and overlays symbols and signs of renewal, often through vibrant female figures. In her reconfiguration of her iconic picture of Falcone at Dalla Chiesa’s funeral in 1982, a youthful woman appears in the foreground, bathed in water spraying from a fountain.
 
In death, as in life, Battaglia’s impassioned commitment to create beauty and hope in her beloved Palermo survives. You can see it on the streets of a city reborn, and on the faces of its honest, well-meaning citizens.
 
 
The photographer who fought the Sicilian Mafia for five decades. By  Robin Pickering-Iazzi. The Conversation, May 2, 2022. 

  Letizia Battaglia, a Sicilian photojournalist who risked her life to document the brutal crimes of her Italian island’s notorious Cosa Nostra Mafia, died April 13 in Cefalù, near the Sicilian capital of Palermo, her hometown. She was 87.

The Associated Press reported her death, citing an announcement by officials including Palermo Mayor Leoluca Orlando, her longtime friend. The cause was not immediately available.

Ms. Battaglia, a onetime reporter who started taking photographs only in 1974, shortly before her 40th birthday, focused her lens on the bloody feuds between the various Cosa Nostra crime families in Sicily, including the Corleone clan from the small town of that name outside Palermo.

Although Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel “The Godfather” about Don Vito Corleone and the subsequent Francis Ford Coppola “Godfather” movies were fictionalized, the Corleonesi were real Mafiosi in Sicily, named after their town rather than a family. (The grandparents of actor Al Pacino, who starred in the “Godfather” films, were from Corleone.)

Ms. Battaglia covered the inter-family feuds mostly by photographing the bodies of their victims. These included rival Mafiosi, corrupt politicians, businessmen and often innocent civilians caught in the crossfire.

In 1979, well aware that she was putting her life on the line, Ms. Battaglia traveled to Corleone and exhibited giant prints of her photographs of Mafia victims in the main square. Most locals stayed away, adhering to the Mafia’s famous omertà, or code of silence.

Easily recognizable by her punky hair, which she dyed in colors including pink and purple even later in life, Ms. Battaglia buzzed through the streets and alleyways of Palermo on an Italian Vespa motor scooter, her Leica dangling from her neck, a cigarette between her lips

.
She was often the first person after police officers to arrive at crime scenes, thanks to a scanner tuned to police radio frequencies. She said police officers were disarmed by her presence and allowed her to get “up close and personal” images, often of corpses lying in pools of blood.

She was one of the first female photographers to work for an Italian newspaper when she first picked up a camera in 1974 for the left-wing daily L’Ora in Palermo. In the following years, she shot around 600,000 images, which she called her “archive of blood.” Never moving to color film, she insisted that her black and white images, with skillful use of light and shadow, were more effective than color in portraying the blood and death caused by the Mafia.

“When you are shooting the dead, using black and white is a way to be delicate, respectful,” she once told London’s Guardian newspaper. “It creates its own silence and silence was very important for me.”
One of her best-known images shows Sergio Mattarella, Italy’s current president, pulling the body of his brother Piersanti, a Sicilian politician, riddled with bullets, out of a car in Palermo in 1980. Another shows a young boy pretending to be a Mafia hit man, pointing a toy gun at passersby while wearing a nylon stocking to disguise his face, a common practice at the time.

She wanted to show how the Mafia’s deep-rooted influence affected ordinary Sicilian society, especially the youth. Her photographs, often first published in L’Ora and picked up by global photo agencies, gradually turned Sicilians against organized crime by showing them that the Mafiosi were not only killing each other but affecting, and sometimes even killing innocent people on their island.

Ms. Battaglia’s images were a major influence on what became known as the Palermo Spring in the late 1980s, when many Sicilians ditched the omertà and took to the streets to denounce the violence of the feuding clans. Ms. Battaglia and Orlando, Palermo’s longtime mayor, were at the forefront of the demonstrations.

Calling her photos “indictments,” Ms. Battaglia once told the German press agency DPA, “I am a messenger of resistance, resistance against violence, corruption, poverty, against moral and political chaos.”

In a 2017 interview with the Guardian, she called the Mafia’s reign of terror in the 1980s the “terrible years. You no longer knew who your friends or enemies were. In the morning, you came out of the house and did not know if you’d come back in the evening. The bosses could blow my head off, any second.

“When the police stopped [the Mafiosi], I approached them, as close as possible, to photograph them, in their handcuffs,” Ms. Battaglia said. “I wanted the bosses to look me in my eyes, even at the cost of spitting on my face.”

The Guardian quoted her as saying that when she attended funerals of Mafiosi, she would cough every time she took a photograph, “so that the click of my shutter could not be heard.” Unbeknown to her, Sicilian police sometimes used her funeral images to identify other Mafiosi and their political and business associates.

Letizia Battaglia was born in Palermo on March 5, 1935, and moved with her parents to northern Italy as a child. She said her childhood was “happy and carefree” until a man exposed himself to her in the street. Her father then demanded that she stay at home, a restriction that led to her eloping at 16 with an older man, Ignazio Stagnitta.

She had three daughters by the time she was in her mid-20s before leaving her husband in 1971 and moving to Milan to work as a journalist.

In Milan, she met Franco Zecchin, a photographer and fellow anti-Mafia activist. They moved to Ms. Battaglia’s native Sicily in 1974, where she was hired by L’Ora. Inspired by the work of American photographer Diane Arbus, Ms. Battaglia first picked up a camera at age 39.

“With this in my hand,” she recalled in a 2019 interview with the Guardian, “I can take on the world.”
One of her first photos for L’Ora was of a Mafioso who had been executed by a rival clan, spread-eagled beneath an olive tree in rural Sicily. Ms. Battaglia told the Guardian in 2019 that she could still recall the smell of that day 45 years later.

“Everyone is equal in death,” she said. “It was very hot and he had been dead for a few days. Now, as soon as you ask about this photograph, it comes back to me. I can almost feel it, this atmosphere of death.”

She hung up her Leica in 1992 after two anti-Mafia judges were murdered. She told friends she was shocked and exhausted by the violence, which never seemed to end.

“Photography changes nothing,” she told the Guardian. “Violence continues, poverty continues, children are still being killed in stupid wars.”

British filmmaker Kim Longinotto told Ms. Battaglia’s story in a 2019 documentary, “Shooting the Mafia,” which was shown at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah.

Survivors include her daughter Shobha Battaglia, herself a well-known photographer and twice winner of a World Press Photo award.

After retiring as a photojournalist, Ms. Battaglia went on to serve as a Green party member with the Palermo city council and the Sicilian regional assembly. Those years were “the worst part of my life, the most humiliating,” she told London’s Sunday Times in 2019. “I didn’t do anything and they paid me a fortune. Everything was decided outside and the Mafia was still there.”

Letizia Battaglia, photographer of Sicilian underworld, dies at 87. By Phil Davison. The Washington Post  , April 16, 2022

Her shocking pictures told the truth about mafia murders – and earned her death threats. Ahead of a powerful film about her extraordinary life, we meet the woman who dared to confront killers.

 
Letizia Battaglia can still remember the first corpse she photographed: a man lying beneath an olive tree in a field in rural Sicily. It remains a viscerally unsettling image, made all the more so by its telling details: the dead man’s shoeless left foot, the resigned gaze of the policeman guarding the body, the olive leaves hanging low over the spreadeagled torso. The fact that he was a mafioso murdered in a local feud is, insists Battaglia, neither here nor there. “Everyone,” she says quietly, “is equal in death.”
 
What has stayed with her, over 40 years later, is the smell that hung in the summer air that day and was carried on the breeze. “It was very hot and he had been dead for a few days,” she says, drawing deeply on a cigarette. “Now, as soon as you ask about this photograph, it comes back to me. I can almost feel it, this atmosphere of death.”
 
We are sitting at a table in Battaglia’s modest flat in central Palermo, her home town, talking about Sicily’s bloody past – what the Italians call “the years of lead”. Now 84, her hair dyed pink as if in defiance of old age, Battaglia is an icon in her native city, the woman who captured the atmosphere of death like no other photographer throughout the dark days of the 1970s and 1980s.
 
Still passionately engaged in the social and political life of the city, she speaks about what she once called her “archive of blood” with a mixture of stoicism, anger and regret. “Photography changes nothing,” she says at one point. “Violence continues, poverty continues, children are still being killed in stupid wars.”
 
Yet Battaglia’s photographs were evidence that held the mafia to account: two of her images were crucial in proving former prime minister Giulio Andreotti’s links to organised crime, as they showed him with an important mafioso, Nino Salvo, whom he had denied knowing. Later, she will take me to see her latest venture, the grandly titled International Centre of Photography, a gallery and creative hub on a former industrial site on the edge of the city.
 
In one room, assistants are hanging a selection of her early work, originally published in Palermo’s left-wing newspaper, L’Ora. One striking photograph shows several mafiosa sitting in a row in a courtroom. The youngest is staring arrogantly at her camera, his finger pointed towards his mouth. “He is saying to me, ‘I will blow your brains out,’” says Battaglia, who lived with regular death threats for two decades.
 
 “Letizia’s pictures confronted the mafia,” says Kim Longinotto, director of an extraordinary new film about Battaglia. “She faced up to the fear they instilled. She refused to be afraid at a time when it could have cost her her life.” Using Battaglia’s images alongside news footage and scenes from classic black and white Italian realist films, Shooting the Mafia is, among other things, a sustained riposte to romanticised Hollywood portrayals of the mafia.
 
“They called themselves men of honour,” says Longinotto. “But, as her photographs show, there was nothing honourable in what they did. Many of those they killed were young activists, trade unionists, truly honourable people challenging corrupt politicians.”
 
In one revealing sequence from the 1980s, Battaglia and her friends stage an impromptu exhibition of her photographs in the village of Corleone, a mafia stronghold that has produced several bosses. The locals initially stare at them out of curiosity then wander away in silence. “It was an act of incredible bravery and defiance.” says Longinotto. “Letizia was forcing them to look directly at what the mafia were doing, but the people were afraid even to be seen looking at the photographs. That is how deep the fear ran.”

 
Battaglia’s rebellious spirit found its true expression in photography. Raised in postwar Palermo, save for a few years when her family relocated to Trieste, she reacted against her strict upbringing by running away to marry a rich older man when she was just 16. Against the odds, the marriage lasted over 20 years and produced three children, whom she took with her when she finally returned to Sicily.
 
Her ambition was to be a writer, but her fledgling journalistic career came to an abrupt end when she first picked up a camera at the age of 40. “I thought, ‘With this in my hand, I can take on the world,’” she says, her eyes lighting up. “Suddenly, I no longer needed kisses or caresses. Instead, I had this confidence, this independence. But it was not just about expressing myself. With the camera, I could also express the inquietude of the world.”
 

When I suggest that she is, at heart, a romantic, she bridles and fixes me with a fierce stare. “No! Photography is not a romantic thing for me. It is not so banal. To create a truly great photograph, you have to work hard and be free. A good photographer needs to be inside the photograph somehow so that the viewer can feel their presence.”
 
Entirely self-taught, she did not realise how powerful her photographs were until years after she took them. “No one told me they were good, but I could feel something. The men photographers kept me apart, they did not invite me to their gatherings and I did not care. It was only in retrospect that I realised I was a storyteller who used images instead of words.”
 
The story she told remains one of the most compellingly powerful in photography’s history. But alongside the horror, there is a strange kind of formal beauty that rests in her intuitive grasp of composition and use of shadow and light. “When you are shooting the dead, using black and white is a way to be delicate, respectful. It creates its own silence and silence was very important for me.”
 
A bleak photograph from 1982 is a case in point: three bodies lie slumped over chairs in a nondescript room, a sex worker and two of her clients, all killed for using heroin that was not supplied by the mafia. “It was such a small room,” she says, “and when I arrived it was full of people: policemen, doctors, magistrates. I had to wait there until, one by one, they left and I was alone with the bodies. It took an eternity, but I had to be alone out of respect for the dead.”

 
There are silence and beauty too in her heartbreaking portrait of Rosario Schifani, which was taken at the funeral of her husband, a bodyguard killed in a car bomb that targeted Battaglia’s friend Giovanni Falcone, a fearless anti-Mafia judge. His death, and that of his associate Paolo Borsellino the same year, caused Battaglia to retreat from the world for a time.
 
“I was in despair,” she says, looking pained. “There were too many dead people. Falcone and Borsellino were symbols of hope, of change, but I loved them as people. It was too much for me. I wanted to die. I had to rebuild myself, but it was so hard, so painful.”
 
At moments like this, one catches a glimpse of the heavy price Battaglia paid for her bravery and commitment. Things have changed for the better, she says, but the Mafia remain a malign invisible force in international crime and politics. Her energies are directed elsewhere these days. She is working on an extended project called Nude Palermo. “It is people of every age and gender – and now, finally, they are not afraid to show themselves. It is not sexy, it is pride, it is strength. Women are freer inside now, they do not wait for the man’s permission.”
 
She smiles and lights another cigarette. “I am optimistic despite all I have seen,” she says, blowing smoke into the air, “I have to be. Not for me, but for the young people. I can see that they need hope and I have to give it to them. Politics shows them only hate. I can show them beauty. My heart has not hardened with age. Always, there is hope, but you must fight for it.”
 
Archive of blood: how photographer Letizia Battaglia shot the mafia and lived. By Sean O’Hagan. The Guardian, November 27, 2019. 

Letizia Battaglia, Italy’s most famous female photojournalist, has developed all of her rolls of film but one. Shot in 1987, the photos show the corpse of a 10-year-old boy, Claudio, who had been killed by the mafia in Palermo.

 
It was a time of war. The Sicilian mafia, known as Cosa Nostra, was leaving bullet-ridden bodies in the streets and assassinating prosecutors with car bombs. Battaglia  of corpses, building a bloody archive in black and white that showed Sicily’s worst face to the world.
 
Thirty years have passed since Battaglia photographed the boy, killed because he had witnessed a murder, and the world around her has changed. Tourism has regenerated Palermo and brought it back from the depths. Most of the Cosa Nostra bosses are in prison and its killers have stopped shooting up the city. Battaglia has changed too. Now, at 82, she is trying to leave behind the horror of those years and searching for innocence and beauty.
 
Her new subject is a 10-year-old girl, the same age as murderedClaudio, in a work called The Beauty of Greta. “This project, in a way, begins from that film roll that was never developed, of the murdered child, that I never found the courage to print,” she said.
 
“The age of 10 is the age of innocence. For me, innocence is synonymous with beauty. Being 10 years old is a magical moment in life. At that age, we are dreaming, we dream of a wonderful future, a future that the mafia, in Sicily, has removed from thousands of people.”
 
Battaglia said it was the impact of Claudio’s murder that decades later had led her to ditch her celebrated noir style. “The constant sight, every day, of all those dead makes you crazy. I have photographed hundreds of them in my life.

 
 “Yet the death of that innocent child, killed because he had witnessed a murder, marked me forever. They took away the right to life. The right to dream. That is why, from the destruction of life, I decided to move on to the construction of life. From horror to beauty.”
 
 Battaglia, who is resuming work after a break of nearly 10 years, lives in the historic centre of Palermo with her 13-year-old dog, Pippo, and has recently agreed to manage a new international photography centre opening in September. Her dream is to bring the British photographer Richard Billingham to Sicily. “For me, he remains the best in the world,” she said.
 
It is far removed from the late 70s, when a war between the mafia families in and around Palermo led to hundreds of deaths. The Corleone clan decided to conquer the city by killing its rivals, along with dozens of police officers, judges and politicians who were trying to stop that war.
 
Riding a Vespa and armed only with her Leica camera, Battaglia scoured the alleys of Palermo, day and night. She was always the first on the scene of the crime, often even before police and relatives.
 
“They were terrible years,” Battaglia said, slowly blowing out cigarette smoke. “You no longer knew who your friends or enemies were. In the morning, you came out of the house and did not know if you’d come back in the evening. The bosses could blow my head off, any second.

 
“When the police stopped them, I approached them, as close as possible, to photograph them, in their handcuffs. I wanted the bosses to look me in my eyes, even at the cost of spitting on my face. That was also a way for me to challenge the mafia.”
 
More than 4,000 mafiosi have been arrested in Sicily since the 1980s. And maybe it’s not a coincidence if Palermo, free from bullets, seems to have been born again. The city was recently named 2018 Italian capital of culture and next year it will host Manifesta, Europe’s most important biennial of contemporary art. Palermo was last year included on the Unesco world heritage list.“But the fight is not over,” Battaglia said. “It’s true, the mafia no longer shoots, but you must not lower your guard. You can also continue to fight the mafia, with beauty,” she said. “Beauty makes us understand what we might lose again.’’
 
From mafia murders to innocent beauty: Letizia Battaglia’s Palermo portfolio. By Lorenzo Tondo. The Guardian, June 2, 2017. 

 

“We stop time,” says Letizia Battaglia of her profession, photography. “If you go back to the great artists of previous centuries, theirs was a magnificent, fantastic interpretation. But it wasn’t reality.”

 Unfortunately for many of her subjects, time stopped just before she got to them. If you have ever been haunted by a photograph of a Mafia killing in Sicily, it is a fair bet that Ms. Battaglia took the picture.
The Maxxi, Italy’s national contemporary art museum in Rome, has gathered more than 300 photographs, contact sheets and contemporary prints for a retrospective of Ms. Battaglia’s work that opens on Nov. 24.

“Her photography is universal,” says Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, one of the show’s three curators. “It recounts humanity with the force and commitment of a work of art. It goes beyond the specific context of Sicily at a particular time to speak to other cultures that have had similar experiences and can identify with people who are suffering, caught between life and death.”
 
One of the exhibition’s most striking aspects is how quickly Ms. Battaglia, now 81 years old, got to the scene of the killings that she recorded—sometimes before police cordoned off the area or draped a sheet over the corpse.
 
Visitors to the Maxxi will first encounter photos of plays that she directed and experimental videos that she produced, as well as her photos of protests in 1970s Milan and photographic portraits of the poet and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini. The museum also will show samples from her most ambitious project: a photographic record of the patients at a psychiatric hospital in Palermo, Sicily, which she visited over a decade.
 
In the second of the two sections of the exhibit, large-format reproductions of 120 of Ms. Battaglia’s most striking images hang from the ceiling. Some are predictable, with victims stretched on the ground or slumped in cars, their windows shattered by gunfire. In another photo, a man lies face down next to a pool of blood, his shirt lifted to his shoulders to reveal a large tattoo of Jesus crowned with thorns.
Her shocking pictures told the truth about mafia murders – and earned her death threats. Ahead of a powerful film about her extraordinary life, we meet the woman who dared to confront killers.

 
Perhaps the most poignant captures the aftermath of a triple homicide. The victims included a prostitute who had been trading drugs without the Mafia’s permission. As if sleeping exhausted, she slumps on the arm of a well-padded chair. Above her hangs a ludicrous poster of a topless model posing in soccer boots and holding a soccer ball.
 
To get the shots for the newspaper that she worked for, Ms. Battaglia had to ignore boundaries. In one picture, a policeman leads away a woman who has just murdered her boyfriend in a jealous rage. Beyond the pair is another photographer, maybe 12 feet away, his camera raised to take the standard picture of an arrest. But Ms. Battaglia can’t have been more than a foot from the policeman’s elbow.
“I always felt a need to show myself; not to hide; to say, ‘I’m here and I’m taking your photograph,’ ” says Ms. Battaglia. “I had cameras broken. I was punched. I was spat at. But that was to be expected,” she adds. One highly placed Mafioso, she recalls, kicked her hard.

 
Though her documentation of Mafia mayhem brought her fame, the exhibition shows her to be much more than an unusually creative ambulance-chaser. We see photos of a rat scuttling down a street in Palermo with a cat right behind; a hunched and wizened old lady contemplating with satisfaction the ice cream that she has just bought for herself on a feast day; a little girl, caught in a shaft of sunlight as she waits round a corner in an alley with her fists clenched, holding what might just be a makeshift garrote.
 
Laced through the show are the photographer’s Sicilian women—fixing the camera with dark, baleful eyes, often with expressions of misgiving and sorrow.
 
Ms. Battaglia started in photography late and almost by accident. At age 37, the mother of two daughters, she was desperate for an income of her own. She wanted to separate from her husband, and Italy had not yet legalized divorce.
 
She looked for work as a reporter at a Sicilian daily, L’Ora. It was August. Most of the journalists were on vacation. “I was lucky,” she says. Soon she moved to Milan and found that editors wanted photos to go with her articles. Approaching the age of 40, she picked up a camera professionally for the first time. She became so good at it, her old paper asked her to return as head of photography. She arrived back in Sicily just as Mafiosi from the town of Corleone were muscling their way into Palermo, murdering whoever got in their way.
 

For years, Ms. Battaglia says, she used a “very simple” Pentax. “I was never one for the technical side—I put up with it.” But she took “lots and lots and lots of photographs” on each assignment. And back at the paper, “in among the bad ones, there’d be a good one.”
 
Today, helped by the Rome-based publishing house Drago, she is painstakingly sifting through the discards. Some of her discoveries are in the exhibition, which ends March 30 and may go to other countries, according to Mr. Pietromarchi.
 
“Listen,” she says with a ring of youthful enthusiasm in her gravelly voice. “I’m actually impressing myself with the power of what I have done.”
 
The exhibition at the Maxxi was curated by Paolo Falcone, Margherita Guccione and Bartolomeo Pietromarchi.
 
Icons | Mafia Mayhem at a Museum. By John Hooper. The Wall Street Journal,   November 18, 2016. 

When Letizia Battaglia returned to Palermo in 1974 from a three-year sojourn in Milan, the city was enjoying a period of relative calm. There was the endemic corruption, obviously, and the usual posse of self-serving politicians. But no one was expecting a bloodbath, least of all Battaglia. She was already a 40-year-old mother of three, enjoying her first steady job as picture editor of a city newspaper. She wasn't looking to cover a war. But war, it seemed, had decided to come looking for her.
 
Sitting at a low table in her eighth-floor apartment in Palermo, Battaglia, now 76, flicks through some of the iconic images she captured during what Italians call the anni di piombo, the years of (flying) lead. Eighteen years in which the ferocious Corleonesi mafia clan would claim the lives of governors, senior policemen, entire mafia families and, ultimately, two of Battaglia's dearest friends: the anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
 
This May marks the 20th anniversary of Falcone's assassination by a massive motorway bomb, which also killed the husband of Rosaria Schifani, one of Falcone's bodyguards. In the intervening years the big drug-trafficking wars have shifted, on a blood meridian, from Sicily to the Mexican border. But Battaglia's photographs testify that nothing has changed, that none of this is new. The techniques pioneered by the Corleonesi have proved their efficacy. Maximum violence. Total extermination of your rivals. Intimidation of the state.
 
If horror still lurches reliably out of Battaglia's pictures, so do the more complicated emotions of pity and despair. To many, these are the qualities that elevate them to the status of art. Battaglia's reputation has steadily risen over the years, attracting awards and exhibition space as far afield as New York and Amsterdam. But long before the foreign prizes and plaudits arrived, she'd already received domestic recognition of a more heartfelt kind: death threats.
 
That Battaglia ignored the threats, despite being advised to lie low by Falcone himself, comes as no surprise once you've met her. At first she puts you at ease with her husky laugh and friendly little dog, Pippo. Her apartment is dark and cool, the walls adorned with two of her more soothing photographic portraits: a girl, and a dove. Further along is a framed Red Flag (it's from India, sent by a daughter), which seems in keeping with Battaglia's bohemian dress and 60s fringe. Beyond the bookshelves is a balcony, its tiles and pot plants shining in the summer sun. Framed by the door the view could almost be a photo, a sanitised vision of the sunny present.
 
But once her eyes have fixed on you, her intensity is revealed. Let your gaze drift down to your notebook when she is declaiming something and you are abruptly reprimanded. "Look me in the eyes!" She is deadly serious. She insists on being heard. She smokes a lot.
 
During the height of the violence Battaglia would get called out at all hours of the day and night, and be on the scene of a murder, pushing through ghoulish crowds of onlookers, before the blood of the dead had begun to dry. It was unrelenting: they would find as many as seven bodies at a time. No sooner had she and her colleagues raced across town on mopeds to cover one killing, than they would receive news of another hit. "Before you'd even dealt with the desperation and suffering of one murder, you were already on the way to another. More blood, more violence."
 
But she didn't stop. This was never just a job. It was her duty as a citizen, she believed. And it showed. These urgent, often grainy shots were politics of the most incendiary kind. They were asking a question that no one at the time wanted, or dared, to hear: why?
 
"The worst thing was that we didn't understand at first where this inferno came from, she says. "No one knew about the Corleonesi. No one was getting caught for these crimes. And they always killed the best people. The best judges, the best policemen, the best politicians. It took years to understand what was going on, thanks to the work of Falcone and the testimony of the pentito Tommaso Buscetta."
 
Battaglia's inability to shield herself from the horrors she witnessed is still evident. At one point she shudders and asks me to put away a photo taken by her then-boyfriend and fellow photographer, Franco Zecchin. The photo in question has an almost surreal quality to it – three bored-looking young men slouch in the back of a bus, looking for all the world as if they haven't realised they're dead yet.
 
However, Battaglia didn't only photograph corpses. She ranged across Sicily, taking in religious festivals, psychiatric hospitals, crumbling slums and aristocratic salons. The stars of her photos are often young women, quietly enduring their various predicaments. The compassion that shines out of these portraits dispels any doubts one might entertain while wading through the bloodier end of her catalogue. Her art is not exploitative – it is about exploitation.
 
Though Battaglia describes her own childhood as serene, it was also suffocatingly cloistered. Palermo after the war was not a place for independent-minded girls and her father was possessive. He kept her locked up in the family home. "I couldn't go out because men would bother me on the street, even at 11 years of age," she says. Life with her jealous father soon became intolerable and at the first opportunity she bolted, which in those days meant marriage – at the age of 16, to a prosperous older man who worked in the coffee business.
 
Three children followed, but little happiness. Twenty-one years would pass before Battaglia finally mustered the courage to walk out. In a country where divorce was still illegal and feminism just a distant rumour, she installed herself and her daughters in the single room of an "alternative" household in Milan. She was penniless but free. Her family considered her ruined.
 
In Milan she learned her craft as a photo-reporter and soon, despite her family's forebodings, she was enjoying success and all the other things she'd previously lacked in life: creativity, independence, intellectual friends. Among these was the Sicilian author Leonardo Sciascia. It was he who later wrote a catty article that labelled Borsellino as a "professional of the anti-mafia". The article was seized upon by the judge's enemies and used to isolate him. Five years later both he and Falcone were blown up by two separate bombs, one after the other. The judges knew it was coming. As Falcone said: "It is my destiny to take a bullet from the mafia one day. The only thing I don't know is when."

 
"Sciascia was an adorable person, but he had an outdated idea of the mafia," Battaglia says. "He made a mistake with that article, but I forgave him." As for Falcone and Borsellino, she has only praise. "I have two photographs of each of us together, taken by my daughter. They are the most important photographs of my life. I was proud to know them. These two brave Sicilians died to defend us."
 
But perhaps the most important friendship she made was with the maverick anti-mafia mayor of Palermo, Leoluca Orlando, with whom she served both on the city council and as a deputy in the regional parliament. "Those were the most beautiful years of my life. Better than being in love, or having children."
 
A price must be paid for this kind of political commitment. It was difficult for her daughters; it was difficult for her, too. When she bought an apartment in one of the roughest parts of town, intending to share the people's problems, she was repeatedly burgled under the eyes of her neighbours who, true to form, never saw a thing. A cynic might suggest this was a classic case of a communist intellectual showing solidarity with the masses, and the masses failing to reciprocate. But at least the thieves didn't steal her negatives. Battaglia's immense archive would provide sensational evidence when the former Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti found himself in court answering charges of links to the mafia. Battaglia, years before, had taken a photo of him during a visit to Sicily which unwittingly showed him in the company of a mafioso. Despite this, the prosecution never succeeded in securing a conviction.
 
It was a defeat for the anti-mafia movement, one of many. But despite the difficulties of winning cases such as these, Battaglia believes that the answer to defeating Cosa Nostra is deceptively simple. "The mafia can be beaten, but only if people stop voting for dishonest politicians. It's no longer just a Sicilian problem. It's all over Italy."
 
Battaglia no longer does reportage – "I'm too old to keep walking the streets" – but she regularly visits schools and attends anti-mafia events, however lost the cause may seem sometimes. Is this what people mean when they describe her as impegnata, involved?
 
"It means setting an example," she says. "It means opposing the mafia in everything that I say and buy and eat. Every person that I meet, every gesture that I make, it's all connected to the need to liberate my country from the mafia." In a city like Palermo, where the vast majority of shops and businesses pay extortion money, that's not as easy as it sounds.
 
In fact, Battaglia doesn't go out much any more, except in the morning to walk the dog. She avoids contact with the city's middle classes, deemed guilty of what she calls moral absenteeism. She admits: "Palermo is a bit of a prison for me – it holds me down. Every now and then I need to get away. I even moved to Paris for a year and a half, but I couldn't help thinking about Palermo – despite all of its problems, its shit, its corruption, which is even worse now than it was before."
 
These symptoms of embittered love will be familiar to anyone who has lived in Sicily for an extended period of time. The place is infuriating, self-destructive and very nearly hopeless, but you can't shake it off. As Battaglia's friend Sciascia once said: "I hate and detest Sicily insofar as I love it, and insofar as it does not respond to the kind of love I would like to have for it.
 
 
Letizia Battaglia: shooting the mafia. By Peter Jinks. The Guardian, March 4, 2012.