Midnight in Sicily

Behind Sicily's beauty lies a darker story of power and silence.

Beginning with the trial of seven-times Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti for alleged Mafia involvement, Peter Robb enters a Sicily where politics, organised crime, culture and everyday life cannot easily be separated.

Moving through Palermo and across southern Italy, Midnight in Sicily combines investigation with history, art, literature and food. Robb follows the long entanglement of Cosa Nostra with political and economic power, from post-war Sicily to the assassinations of anti-Mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino and the trials and revelations that followed.

Markets, meals, painting and writing are essential to Robb’s understanding of the island. Leonardo Sciascia, Renato Guttuso and the physical life of Palermo sit alongside judges, politicians and Mafia bosses.

The result is a dark, sensual portrait of Sicily and a searching account of how corruption survives by becoming part of the systems meant to contain it