Like plundering barbarians, mafiosi devastated the city with cement, disfiguring its parks, landscape and natural beauty Maurizio Carta, academic And there one can see what is the mafia by looking at the shameless, gaudy villas of bosses, each one a demonstration of strength, just like monarchies and dictatorships. Evidence of the mafia lies in the replacement of exquisite 19th-century residences with concrete blocks, and in the dozens of unfinished and dilapidated constructions on the shores of spectacular beaches, where mobsters with ties to public administrators were permitted to build. The Observer travelled to Italy’s southern regions with a history of organised crime. Ciancimino, who was neither an artist nor an architect, authorised the construction of 4,000 apartment blocks in Palermo, almost half of which were built by companies with direct ties to Cosa Nostra clans. Because mafia architecture, like all activities of the clans, has its own syntax, logic and function.īernini designed the splendid Fountain of the Four Rivers in Rome’s Piazza Navona and St Peter’s Square. Mobsters changed the shape of Italian cities, ravaging landscapes with concrete to affirm their authority. Three centuries after Pope Urban VIII entrusted the architectural and urban planning of the Catholic church to Gian Lorenzo Bernini to represent the Vatican as a triumphal force, the mafia was using architecture to display its power. He adds: “The bosses also sent a message to the thousands of citizens who were homeless after the second world war: if those families had found a home, it was thanks to the mobsters.” With those towering constructions built along the coast and at the foot of the mountains, Palermo became a hot, muggy, suffocating city.” “Palermo had been built to allow the breeze to rebound off the mountains and swirl back down to cool the city. “They sent a message to the institutions, making it clear that they, the bosses, had the power to change not only the laws that regulated the urban planning projects and the shape of the city, but also the local climate.
“With the sack of Palermo, the mafia exhibited its enormous criminal power,” says Carta. Palermo’s skyline is now dominated by brutalist tower blocks after the mafia’s demolition of the city’s grand art nouveau mansions.
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