When the Italian Fondazione Falcone inaugurated its first office overseas, here in Malta, Foundation President Maria Falcone made two important points.
One: Sicily and Malta being geographically close, it made sense to open the first overseas office here. Two: she stopped short of claiming that the two island communities are also culturally close.
She’s right. Malta and Sicily are culturally close but only on a few out of the many possible levels, as resemblances but also dissimilarities abound. It’s the premise, I suppose, on which the Foundation’s Malta office was predicated.
Based in Palermo, the Falcone Foundation was founded in 1992, a few months after the assassination of magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, courageous, possibly even hardheaded, frontliners in the fight against the Sicilian Mafia. The foundation aims to promote the rule of law (legalità) in society, particularly through the education of the young.
The foundation’s raison d’être is akin to Repubblika’s, the Maltese NGO until recently headed by notary Robert Aquilina, who will now represent the Falcone Foundation locally. Despite the temptation, one has to resist calling him ‘The Maltese Falcon’. It’s but a pun (with no real parallels to either book or movie). More importantly, implying that Aquilina is Malta’s Falcone would be ominous.
Then again, if the mood is for avian puns: Giovanni was Falcone and Robert is Aquilina (small eagle).
This little game of puns and (superficial?) parallelisms reflects the nature of the rhyming (though not identical) cultural similarities between the two island communities.
Falcone staunchly believed in the State. So staunchly, he died for his beliefs, in a region where the Italian State is still struggling to subdue organised crime.
Ironically, the Mafia’s origins are political. I see the Mafia as the direct descendant of the early 19th-century private armies of bandits and outlaws who worked underhandedly for the Sicilian nobility in its bid to resist the king of Naples’ land reforms.
For these noblemen, the Italian unification project offered a means to thwart the king’s efforts. The Maltese don’t share this history. To use a metaphor, we and the Sicilians share much of our genetic heritage but live in different ecosystems. The external stressors are different; the reactions to them are similar if not identical.
Love for the ‘public thing’
Falcone was related to a patriot executed for his ideals, something I discovered while waiting for the ceremony to begin. I found out that Falcone’s mother was a Bentivegna, immediately reminding me of Francesco Bentivegna (1820-1856), a follower of Giuseppe Mazzini, the patriot who spearheaded the revolutionary movement for Italian unification.
I asked the foundation in Palermo and they confirmed my intuition: Falcone was distantly related to Bentivegna. Patriotism runs in this family’s blood: the same blood they are ready to spill for their love of the ‘public thing’. (Think about it: res publica – public thing – as opposed to cosa nostra – our thing.)
Falcone’s family background was imbued with clear ideas about the State – an oddity in an island community where the idea of the modern State is manifestly ambiguous, if not primitive.
Daphne Caruana Galizia was assassinated because, in her idiosyncratic way, she campaigned for a stronger State that could resist greed- Mark Sammut Sassi
Some background can be found in a 2021 piece published by Corriere d’Italia paraphrasing the ideas of author-politician Leonardo Sciascia (1921-1989): “The Enlightenment never reached Sicily[...] The Mafia, in a sense, was a kind of petty bourgeois revolution, the only one possible in Sicily. The instrument of the Enlightenment – Reason – has been completely lacking in our land[...] Sicily offers a representation of so many problems, so many contradictions, not only Italian but also European, to the point of being a metaphor for today’s world.”
(On Sciascia, read Ranier Fsadni’s ‘The Mafioso as Faust’, Times of Malta, November 21, 2019.)
Shared cultural substratum
Whereas the histories of the two islands differ, the cultural substratum is partly shared. It all boils down to money, land, greed.
Daphne Caruana Galizia was assassinated because, in her idiosyncratic way, she campaigned for a stronger State that could resist greed. She had her shortcomings (mixing obnoxious gossip with anti-corruption criticism, say) but, all in all, she was, like Falcone, a believer in the State.
Others have been assassinated, sometimes by hitmen imported directly from Sicily, because of land deals. It seems natural for the Maltese, like for the Sicilians, to manage the ‘deep’ real estate market with the lupara or its equivalent.
Last April, Manuel Delia argued that the Mafia has infiltrated the Maltese State. The same point had been made by Fsadni in a 2018 article.
Earlier this year, Fsadni felt compelled to “wonder if the Maltese State even exists”. If the modern State’s quintessential characteristic is the rule of law (English for legalità – the topmost objective of the Falcone Foundation), it becomes clear that Maria Falcone was responding to a similar but not identical cultural phenomenon: the weak presence of the (Italian) State in Sicily.
In Malta, a cohort of Maltese intellectuals sees a weak State and, almost as a necessary corollary, strong connections between the Mafia(s) and top-level State administrators. The difference could be nothing more than a difference of form: Malta, an independent State; Sicily an autonomous region of a larger State. But momentarily putting that difference of form aside, the cultural (or anthropological) similarities become conspicuous and striking.
Our president, Myriam Spiteri Debono, participated in the ceremony, delivering a powerful speech (rightly) perceived as conveying a message of hope: there’s somebody in the State apparatus who takes the concerns about Mafia-State relationships seriously.
Last April, Spiteri Debono said that, although she didn’t share the perception of Malta being a Mafia State, she still believed that “We need to reform the soul of the State… people of the State should believe in good governance, embrace it and show respect to the institutions”.
The president adroitly used a religious term: “the soul of the State”. A notable choice of words that reminds one of Hegel: “The State is the divine idea as it exists on earth.”
From this perspective, it made a lot of sense that the archbishop was represented at the ceremony. Giving to Caesar what belongs to Caesar is obeying God’s command. Ensuring that Caesar (the State) isn’t taken over by criminals is giving to Caesar what’s his.
Be that as it may. Implementing his vision of a stronger State where legalità triumphs over private greed is likely to be a long haul for Aquilina. I have no doubt he’s resilient. But it won’t be easy. It might even take him the better part of his life. I wish him every success in his endeavours.
His success will be our success.
Mark Sammut Sassi is a notary and author.