Midnight In Sicily

Midnight in Sicily is what happens when a travel writer arrives on a beautiful Mediterranean island, admires the churches, tastes the pasta, studies the paintings and gradually notices that half the people under discussion have been murdered.

Peter Robb lived in southern Italy for fourteen years and came away with something far richer and considerably more alarming than the usual collection of sunlit recollections. Sicily certainly supplies the expected pleasures—food, wine, art, landscape and ancient streets glowing magnificently in the evening—but behind the scenery lies a society shaped by poverty, political corruption, organised crime and the traditional Sicilian understanding that certain questions are healthiest when left unasked.

At the centre of the book is Giulio Andreotti, seven-time Italian prime minister, veteran political survivor and a man whose appearance suggested that even his shadow had signed a confidentiality agreement. His trial for alleged Mafia associations opens the door onto a murky world where ministers, businessmen, judges, policemen, priests and criminals appear in constantly changing combinations. Everyone knows everybody, nobody remembers anything and the most important meetings have somehow never taken place.

Robb examines the Mafia not as a picturesque collection of men in dark suits making dramatic offers, but as a system entwined with land, money, elections and government. Violence is rarely theatrical. It is practical, targeted and followed by official expressions of astonishment from people who had apparently failed to notice decades of corpses accumulating around them. In this Sicily, power does not need to announce itself; it merely waits for inconvenient witnesses to reconsider their evidence.

Yet this is not simply a book about organised crime. Robb moves through Sicilian history, literature, painting and food, showing how each illuminates the others. Writers such as Leonardo Sciascia understood that detective fiction in Sicily has a structural problem: the detective may uncover the truth, but truth has little authority when everybody responsible for enforcing it has gone to lunch with the suspects. Art and literature therefore become alternative evidence, recording what official history prefers to mislay.

Food receives equally serious attention, as it should in a place where lunch may communicate family, class, memory, geography and several centuries of foreign occupation before the pudding arrives. Robb writes sensuously about southern Italian cooking without turning it into the usual tourist fantasy of eternally cheerful peasants presenting aubergines to passing foreigners. The food is glorious, but the people eating it remain entangled in history, politics and the occasional conspiracy.

The result is part travel book, part political investigation, part cultural history and part prolonged attempt to explain an island that has spent centuries resisting explanation. Sicily emerges as dazzling and damaged, hospitable and secretive, intensely local yet connected to the highest levels of Italian power. Robb is fascinated by it without becoming sentimental, which is difficult when the landscape is beautiful enough to make corruption look temporarily picturesque.

First published in 1996, Midnight in Sicily covers the turbulent decades leading to the great Mafia trials and political scandals of the 1990s. This 2015 Vintage edition brings together 352 pages of beauty, brutality, paintings, politicians, writers, prosecutors, meals and men who insist they have never met one another despite appearing together in several photographs.

An absorbing choice for readers of Italian history, true crime, politics, travel writing and books in which dinner may be followed by either an art discussion or an assassination. It is probably best read with a glass of red wine, a plate of pasta and no immediate ambitions to enter Sicilian local government.

This copy is in Good condition, showing ordinary signs of previous ownership but remaining entirely readable and, so far as Crappy Old Books can establish, uninvolved with any criminal organisation. Sold by Crappy Old Books, where every transaction is transparent, every book is accounted for and nobody has yet required us to make an offer that cannot be refused.

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