As true fans of Inspector Montalbano [see previous post] will know, there is a strong link between his career and the assassination of magistrate Giovanni Falcone. If you don't know it, you need to check out the equally excellent prequel series, Young Montalbano.
Falcone – like Montalbano to a degree – rubbed up against the Mafia but in a much more intense and dangerous way in the all too real world. His campaign to bring the godfathers and mobsters to justice led inevitably to his being blown away in an horrendous bombing near Palermo.
A similar fate soon overtook his fellow magistrate and friend Paolo Borsellino in the city itself.
The gruesome deaths of Falcone and Borsellino seemed to help Sicily turn a corner and to start standing up to the Mafia.
And today the two men are commemorated as martyrs to their cause.
It seemed important to visit the tomb of Falcone in Palermo's San Domenico church – even though the awful truth is that there was nothing left of him to bury.
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| Falcone's tomb ©Nigel Summerley |
A lovely image of him and Borsellino decorates a tall building near the Palermo waterfront: two smiling men united in fighting a war that they well knew would most likely lead to their deaths.
Heroes are so often in short supply... but that is what these men were.
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| Immortalised: Falcone and Borsellino ©Nigel Summerley |
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