Palermo: How the anti-Mafia spirit continues to shape life in the heart of Sicily

Against a hillside on the highway from the airport to Palermo stands a stark white shed daubed with the words “NO MAFIA” in soaring blue letters.

The angry slogan draws drivers’ eyes to the spot where Sicilian judge Giovanni Falcone and his wife, magistrate Francesca Morvillo, were murdered, along with their three-man security detail, by a colossal mafia bomb on May 23, 1992.

Their bodies were vaporised but their awful deaths in the “Capaci massacre” gave life to an anti-Mafia movement that helped change Sicilian society.

For generations the Mafia had extorted protection money (pizzo) from shops and small businesses, and murdered its enemies with impunity, as compromised and intimidated authorities either actively conspired with the gangsters or turned a blind eye to their increasingly brazen crimes.

More than 1000 rivals, critics and bystanders were killed during the so-called “Second Mafia War” between 1978 and 1983, when the Corleone family fought successfully for supremacy over competing clans.

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In response to the carnage an investigation was launched by the “anti-Mafia pool” of prosecutors, including Falcone and his friend, judge Paolo Borsellino. High-ranking mafioso Tommaso Buscetta turned government witness against the mob in a “maxi trial” held in a bunkered courthouse inside a maximum-security prison. In total, 475 alleged mafiosi were indicted, 338 were convicted and 19 bosses received life sentences.

In response, the Mafia murdered Falcone and his wife. Less then two weeks later, Borsellino was blown to pieces outside his mother’s house.

A foundation dedicated to Falcone’s memory and legacy was founded by his older sister Maria. On May 23, 2025, the Falcone Foundation opened the Museum of the Present, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, in Palermo.

The museum is so new and lowkey that it has barely attracted comment online. When I went looking for it, I couldn’t even find a sign outside.

I wandered in off the street without an appointment and the first person I met was Maria’s son, museum president Vincenzo di Fresco.

“I dedicate every single day of my life to honouring my uncle,” he told me. “I don’t usually talk about personal, intimate family memories, but what I remember about Giovanni Falcone is his courage. I was very close to him, like a son, and in the 32 years I knew him I never saw fear in his face.”

But Falcone foresaw his own future. “He knew that one day somebody must kill him,” di Fresco tells ROAM. “The first time he met Buscetta, Buscetta said to him, ‘Are you sure you want to hear my story? You will become very famous because my information is very important – but remember, your dealings with the Mafia will end in your death.’”

The museum holds items such as Falcone’s pen, his diary, and the printer that daily spewed thousands of pages of court documents at the maxi-trial. In the Immersion Room, a colossal cube representing all the stacked trial transcripts hangs from the ceiling, its four faces projected with film of the twisted carcass of Falcone’s car; a fountain of stars; and paper flowing like blood. Newspaper headlines scream of scandal, and prison bars come down around cigar-smoking, gum-chewing, brawling mafiosi.

The chamber is a hall of mirrors. The images are reflected on every wall, so no-one can look away and claim they have not seen the evidence. At the end of the nine-minute presentation, the cube itself seems to burn in the flames of the explosion that consumed Falcone.

The city of Palermo already has a No Mafia Museum, whose collection of pictures is brutal and confronting, like the scrapbook of a serial killer. But the photographed corpses on display – mangled, mutilated and stripped of their dignity – belong to slain mafiosi, not their victims.

The Mafia is no longer the force it once was, and it has shifted much of its focus to operations such as people smuggling, but it remains a real threat. The No Mafia Museum offers tours of Palermo, highlighting the courageous shopkeepers who advertise their refusal to pay the pizzo.

I asked di Fresco if he ever receives threats from the Mafia.

“Today, the Mafia don’t use threats,” he says. “They are more direct. They just kill you.”