The political messaging of Leoluca Orlando, who served five terms as mayor of Sicily's capital, Palermo (most recently, until 2022), articulates a cosmopolitan vision of local identity. Orlando seeks to emphasise Palermo's ‘tolerant’ values, invoking the city's history to foster this image, as well as using a variety of rhetorical strategies. He portrays Palermo as having a true ‘essence’, which is necessarily multicultural. I analyse Orlando's pronouncements on his official Facebook page, as well as observing his audience's reactions to his messaging, both supportive and critical. I examine how Orlando articulates the narrative that Palermo has historically been a ‘mosaic’ of various cultural influences, proposing that the contemporary city is the ‘true’, welcoming face of the Mediterranean. As well as exploring the political utility Orlando sees in such arguments, I analyse the risks inherent in this essentialising project.

Set in contemporary Palermo, Emma Dante's Via Castellana Bandiera (2013) offers a powerful exploration of the South as a site of cultural contact, interaction and confrontation by focusing on a western-like showdown between two women whose lives are differently marked by mobility and migration. In Dante's film, the simultaneous articulation of queerness and southernness is a way to queer the traditional image of the frontier and to offer an evocative elaboration on how identities are constructed, mobilised and played off against each other in the neoliberal context.

This article presents the results of a piece of research into extortion in the city of Palermo between 2004 and 2015. Highlighting the importance of the territorial context among the factors that explain the mafia phenomenon, the study draws on two different georeferencing databases: the first relating to the distribution of extortion across the Sicilian capital's various districts, and the second relating to the distribution of Palermo businesses that had joined the Addiopizzo anti-extortion movement. Although the empirical material is problematic, marked territorial variations emerge from a comparative analysis of the two databases, prompting a number of potential interpretations.

This article presents the results of some empirical research on extortion in Palermo. The project is based on the administration of a structured questionnaire with traders in various districts within Palermo and villages in the provincial interior, in two phases, the first in 2007 and second in 2012. The objective was to explore traders’ opinions on the various aspects of the phenomenon of extortion: its characteristics, causes, possible solutions, and the responsibilities of every actor in the battle against this illegal enterprise. In the period in which the research was undertaken, there was a wave of strong anti-mafia and anti-racketeering activism, particularly stimulated by the emergence in 2004 of the Comitato Addiopizzo and culminating in the establishment of the first ‘antiracket’ association in Palermo.

Mussolini had declared that Fascism, through the anti-mafia campaign entrusted to Cesare Mori, prefect of Palermo, in the second half of the 1920s, had conclusively liberated Sicily from the mafia. However, from the early 1930s a new deterioration of public order on the island was evident, and the regime was forced to launch a second, and much less publicised, repression of this phenomenon. In the course of its careful investigations the body given responsibility for pursuing this repression, the Ispettorato Generale di Pubblica Sicurezza per la Sicilia, compiled a series of reports, including the Processo verbale di denunzia relating to the area around Palermo. With a level of detail never seen before, these reports described the structure, organisation and dynamics of mafia groups. This was possible because police officers had available members of the mafia groups themselves – genuine pentiti – who had decided to make disclosures to the authorities.