Condizioni politiche e amministrative della Sicilia

"I chose it because I think it is by far the sharpest early investigation of the Mafia. In 1875 Franchetti, the author, and a friend of his called Sidney Sonnino traveled around Sicily, and came up with a report on the conditions there, which was in two volumes. The one that was written by Franchetti was about the Mafia, which, incidentally, only got that name in 1863. Before that the Mafia wasn’t known as a collective entity. And one thing that Franchetti understood is that the Mafia’s origins were not to be sought in the remnants of feudalism, but, rather, should be seen as a consequence of the end of feudalism. Feudal laws had been repealed in 1812, which meant that there was a very fast increase in private property in the years following. People began to break up the big baronial and Church lands, to trade land, and private property began to appear. At the same time, another commodity was released on the open market: the armed guards that used to work for the feudal barons. They found themselves without jobs, as it were. And Franchetti understood that there began to be a market for their ability to use violence, mostly in connection with settling disputes. Those disputes arose from the fact that private property had emerged, without proper state institutions; property rights without customs that allow people to know how to handle property. So with the diffusion of land and property, there was also a diffusion of conflict. The different governments that succeeded each other before Italian unification didn’t provide sufficient governance so an informal form of governance began to appear."