The Mafia, Danilo Dolci and the Accusations against Bernardo Mattarella, Father of the Actual Italian President Sergio Mattarella
An Italian story
They remembered him as the Gandhi of Sicily, the non-violent activist who chose one of the poorest lands in Europe to fight in defence of the last. But if that island was starving, the responsibility also lay with Cosa Nostra and its links with political power. This is why, in addition to being a sociologist and poet, Danilo Dolci was also a reporter and anti-mafia activist: He was the first to investigate the patronage system that has governed political relations since the post-war period. And it was from this type of analysis that Dolci came to denounce the relations between bosses and leading members of the Christian Democrats. For this he was tried and convicted. These events, however, have completely disappeared from the recollections published by newspapers and news sites on the centenary of the sociologist's birth. A rather significant omission, if we think that Dolci was also brought to trial by Bernardo Mattarella, the father of the current President of the Republic. But let us go in order.
The first trial
Originally from Sesana – now in Slovenia, but at the time in the province of Trieste – Dolci lived most of his life in Trappeto, a tiny town between Palermo and Trapani, where at the time the misery was so black that children could even die of starvation. Much has been written about Dolci's denunciations of the living conditions of peasants in post-war Sicily. The sociologist is the inventor of the reverse strike: In 1956 he organised hundreds of unemployed people who set to work rebuilding an abandoned road.
For this he ends up on trial on charges of land invasion. Norberto Bobbio, Italo Calvino, Alberto Moravia, Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, among others, lined up in his defence. Assisting him as his lawyer was Piero Calamandrei, who in his harangue asked for his acquittal with these words: “Help us, gentlemen judges, with your sentence, help the dead who sacrificed themselves and help the living, to defend this Constitution that wants to give all the citizens of our country equal justice and equal dignity!” The constituent father's arguments were not enough to convince the Partinico judge: In the end Dolci was sentenced to 50 days imprisonment.
The accusations against Mattarella
What is omitted, on the centenary of his birth, is above all the second trial to which the Gandhi of Sicily was subjected. An affair that is still controversial today, but historically relevant and for this reason deserves to be remembered. It was 1965 when Dolci called a press conference in Rome to present a dossier he had just presented to the Anti-Mafia Commission, which was later published in the book Chi gioca solo (Einaudi). In those documents, the sociologist accuses some of the most important Christian Democrat politicians of the time in Sicily of collusion with the Mafia: Bernardo Mattarella and Calogero Volpe. Both deputies from the time of the Constituent Assembly, at that time they were respectively Minister for Foreign Trade and Undersecretary for Health in Aldo Moro's second government.
Dolci's accusations caused a lot of uproar, the two politicians reacted with a lawsuit: The sociologist ended up on the stand again, together with his collaborator Franco Alasia. Defending Mattarella are two princes of the bar: Giovanni Leone, former president of the Chamber of Deputies, the Council and future head of state, and Girolamo Bellavista, former deputy and former defender of Michele Navarra, Corleone's mafia boss, and later also of his murderer, the boss Luciano Liggio. Long afterwards, Bellavista's name would appear among the members of the P2 Masonic lodge: the lawyer, however, had already been dead for five years when Licio Gelli 's lists became public knowledge in 1981.
The condemnation of the Gandhi of Sicily
Given also the importance of the protagonists, the trial of Dolci and Alasia became a political-judicial case. For two years the newspapers followed the hearings in which dozens of witnesses paraded: Giulio Andreotti, Cardinal Enrico Ruffini, Charles Poletti, the Commissioner for Civil Affairs of Amgot, the American military government in occupied Italy.
In the end, Dolci and Alasia failed to prove their accusations against Mattarella and Volpe: On 21 June 1967, the court sentenced them to two years for defamation. A sentence that is not served thanks to the pardon approved a few months earlier. The sentence was confirmed by the Court of Appeal in 1972 and then the following year also by the Court of Cassation. The motivations state that “Mattarella always unequivocally expressed his condemnation of the Mafia phenomenon” and “never came into contact with the Mafia environment, which he openly and decisively opposed throughout his political career”.
According to the judges, Sergio Mattarella's father has “brought to the knowledge of the Court, objectively documenting it, the attitude of unsurpassable opposition to the Mafia taken and maintained throughout his political career”. The magistrates do not believe the accusations made by Dolci and Alasia: “Nothing in the dossier that formed the basis of the massive attack against Mattarella has been corroborated and corroborated by the evidence, as the statements collected by the defendants are nothing more than the result of irresponsible gossip, malicious hearsay or even outright falsehood.”
Bernardo Mattarella was not to see Dolci definitively sentenced: He died on 1st of March 1971, a year before the second degree sentence, struck down by an illness while in Montecitorio. At the time he was chairman of the Defence Commission, since Moro had ousted him from his third government in 1966. Dolci's trial had just begun, but Mattarella's exclusion from the executive was simply motivated by “questions of balance” between the DC currents.
The Kennedys of Sicily
The story of the Italian Gandhi's conviction for defaming Mattarella senior remained confined to the old pages of newspapers until 2015, when his youngest son Sergio Mattarella was elected to the Quirinal. At that point, the shadows cast in the past on the progenitor of the family that many call “the Kennedys of Sicily” come back to the fore.
Like Jfk's clan, in fact, the Mattarellas too have had a political history punctuated by grief and sorrow: The accusations of contiguity hurled at Bernardo are accompanied by the anti-Mafia activities of Piersanti, Sergio's elder brother, president of the Sicilian Region and a pupil of Moro, who was killed by Cosa Nostra. The killers murdered him under his house on Epiphany 1980: Among the first responders was the future head of state, photographed by Letizia Battaglia minutes after the murder. In February 2015, that snapshot became the cover of the election to the Quirinale of the Mattarella family's youngest son, the Kennedys of Sicily.
The other lawsuit
When he became the twelfth president of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella had already made a 250.000 euro claim for damages against the writer Alfio Caruso. Together with his grandchildren Bernardo junior and Maria, in fact, the future head of state had accused the author of the book Da Cosa nasce cosa (Longanesi) of having “besmirched the figure of Mattarella the father” and of having described his brother Piersanti's political relations “in a crude manner”. The book was published in 2000, but the Mattarellas did not sue until 2009.
Eight years later, in 2017, the judge of the first civil section of the Palermo court, Maura Cannella, sentenced Caruso to pay 30.000 euros. Underlying this sentence, later confirmed in appeal, was Dolci's old conviction, produced by the Mattarella family's defenders. The claims of Caruso's lawyer Fabio Repici, who argued that the 1967 sentence belonged to “that reactionary jurisprudence that often denied the very existence of the Mafia”, were of no use during the trial. The defence lawyer also filed some statements by collaborators of justice Tommaso Buscetta and Francesco Marino Mannoia, who had accused old Bernardo of having links with Cosa Nostra, many years after Dolci's conviction for defamation. Also on file was a 2016 report in which the turncoat Francesco Di Carlo claimed to have known Mattarella senior as a “man of honour” from Castellammare del Golfo, the seaside village in the province of Trapani where the family of the current head of state comes from. Statements, the latter, which the court deemed “late” with respect to the terms of the investigation.
The request for revision
It was still using the minutes of Buscetta, Mannoia and Di Carlo that in 2016 Repici asked the Rome Court of Appeal to open revision proceedings on the conviction of Dolci and Alasia. In support of his request, the lawyer argued that “after the conviction became final (confirmed by the Court of Cassation in '73), incontrovertible elements of evidence have arisen that require, today, the acquittal of the two convicts”.
In short: It would not have been possible to convict Dolci of defamation if the statements by Buscetta, Mannoia and Di Carlo had already existed in the 1970s. According to the lawyer, if Mattarella had still been alive in the years in which the pentiti's declarations were made, “it would have followed that he would have been entered in the register of suspects for the crime of external complicity in mafia-type association”. And again, in the old libel trial, Repici stressed the “prejudicial unreliability of exculpatory witnesses because of their social or political background”.
In short, the judges did not consider the witnesses in favour of Dolci credible because they were communists. In the lawyer's opinion, therefore, it appeared “now right that the memory of Dolci, a person who illustrated the Italian nation in every corner of the planet for his outstanding social and humanitarian commitment that won him the reputation of the Italian Gandhi, and the figure of his collaborator Alasia should finally be compensated and relieved of an infamous sentence, also to free the Italian jurisdiction from a ruling that marked one of the lowest points in the field of mafia and anti-mafia”.
The Court of Appeal in Rome, however, rejected that request: For the judges, there were no grounds to open revision proceedings. Dolci, therefore, remains convicted of defaming Bernardo Mattarella and Calogero Volpe. It was certainly a controversial affair, but one that caused a great stir in the media. And which had a profound influence on Danilo Dolci's life . That is why omitting it tout court probably does a disservice to the memory of the Gandhi of Sicily.
(Based on an article of Giuseppe Pipitone in “Il Fatto Quotidiano” from the 1st of July 2024.)