A photograph in Caroline Moorehead’s A Sicilian Man: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul, shows the writer and some-time politician in the late 1940s standing in bright Sicilian sunshine beside his wife Maria, with their young daughter Laura between them. Maria, conscious of the child, or of herself, stares at the ground, while Sciascia looks at the camera, a quizzical expression tensing his brows. Short and neat, his hair is already receding from a smooth, wide forehead. His shirt is crisp, while his trousers appear three sizes too wide, as if cut for the man Sciascia was to become – one of Italy’s most revered writers and the “conscience of an entire nation”, as one journalist put it – rather than for the humble schoolteacher he then was. He had not yet published a word, although in the evenings, after the day’s lessons, he filled exercise books with tales about Sicily, its people and the things that went on.
Sciascia’s beginnings were modest: he was born in Racalmuto, a small town in the west of the island, in 1921, to Pasquale, a clerk employed by the local sulphur mine, and Genoveffa, whose family owned a tile factory. Other families might have been forced to sell Leonardo to the mine from the age of six, to work as a caruso, a pack “animal”, conveying tens of kilos of ore from the Earth’s bowels to the surface. Sciascia was always aware of his privilege; unlike Racalmuto’s other children, he dressed well (his uncle was a tailor) and wore shoes all year round. Given his timid character and weak constitution – he was small and skinny even before contracting malaria around the age of ten – the mines would have finished him. Instead, like many shy, sickly children, he lost himself in books and films, and in gossip overheard from the balcony of his aunts’ house, where he lived amid three generations of Sciascia – partly, it seems, because the zie (aunts) were so overbearing nobody could have refused. It was the younger of them, Maria Concetta, who taught Leonardo to read, giving him free reign of shelves brimming with Diderot, Hugo, Stendhal. Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed, imprinted itself on him, as did Pirandello’s sceptical view of reality and keen eye for the absurdities of power. Sciascia loved and loathed Pirandello, Moorehead says, “like a son with a father, overwhelmed by his ‘mysterious, chaotic and incandescent’ prose, but repelled by his ardent early espousal of fascism”. Because, lest we forget, history, or History, played its part in Sciascia’s evolution. Moorehead captures something of the tension between daily life and global developments – and between innocence and experience – in the image of a four-year-old Sciascia waiting among crowds desperate to catch a glimpse of Il Duce, who was touring Sicily at the height of his powers: “What Sciascia would remember was the intense heat and a stain on his white clothes from a spilt fizzy orange drink.”
The history in Moorehead’s book is not only that of fascism’s rise and subsequent mutations. As crucial to her understanding of Sciascia is the history of Sicily, an island of “exceptional fertility” that has been invaded, plundered and occupied for more than 2,000 years. Every invader left their trace, from Goths and Vandals, Byzantines and Greeks, to the Romans and Normans, Spanish, Piedmontese and even, briefly, British, with their vain attempt in the 1800s to replace medieval disorder with liberal parliamentarianism. Napoleon, Moorehead points out, never made it, “thereby denying the island the benefits of the Enlightenment”, and all this shaped Sicily and Sciascia who, in adolescence, discovered France’s Encyclopédistes and with them “the idea that the weak might be perceived not as failures but as good, that war could be seen as stupid, feudal justice unjust, and that hard work might be rewarded by pleasure”.
But every hero – for that is how many came to see Sciascia, as a crusader for truth, a friend of the abused – is cast against, even created by, his antagonist. After his own life story and the story of Sicily and Italy itself, Moorehead’s fourth strand, “The rise of the Mafia”, brings darkness and villainy to match Sciascia’s quest for “just justice”. She charts Sciascia’s observations of the Mafia from childhood, when he could not yet name the malign forces manipulating daily life, to adulthood, when he named the evil at every opportunity, calling out the Mafia as well as the corrupt politicians who enabled and profited from it.
Although Sciascia alluded to the Mafia as early as 1956 in Le parrocchie di Regalpetra, a thinly veiled fiction set in small-town Sicily, it was his first “proper” novel, Il giorno della civetta (The Day of the Owl, 1961), that offered the first unblinkered fictional portrayal of the Mafia and, as Moorehead says, “an uncannily prescient warning of the perils of ignoring it”. Most people did continue to close their eyes to the Mafia, however, choosing not to see the corrosive effect of the shadow world until almost no part of the “aboveground” remained untainted, from national and international governments to major banks and the Vatican. For 30-odd years, Sciascia’s crime novels and inchieste, non-fiction inquiries into historical injustices, chronicled, often pre-emptively, almost every step in the evolution of Mafia power, from dusty relic of feudalism to multinational, multibillion-dollar crime organisation. Sometimes his cynicism drew ire: as Umberto Eco said after Sciascia’s death, “he possessed a rare gift: the courage to be unpopular”.
The disconnect between what is seen and not seen, between the real and the “unreal” (which is to say, the unimagined) threads through Sciascia’s books, as it does through Moorehead’s account of Sicilian and, more broadly, Italian life. As Sciascia expressed in an interview of 1979, Sicily is not merely a geographical place, but a symptom and symbol of the human struggle against moral ambivalence and the stifling of reason by unchallenged custom and authority.
Moorehead’s epigraph from Pier Paolo Pasolini, in which we might drop the final two words, makes the point: “The intellectual courage to be truthful and political reality are two irreconcilable practices in Italy.” For this reason, Sciascia, though passionately of the left, never definitively aligned himself with any party. When, in 1975, he ran for Palermo’s city council, he did so as an “Indipendente” on the Communist Party’s ticket (Italian politics allows for such paradoxes), and when he resigned two years later it was in protest at the party’s “historic compromise” with the ruling Christian Democrats, reviled by Sciascia. When he ran for the national parliament soon after, he was, again, elected as an independent, this time for the Radical Party. He was averse to any hint of cloak and dagger; Natalia Ginzburg, herself a writer and parliamentarian, praised his “unmasked face”. For Moorehead, likewise, Sciascia always saw and spoke reality – the words “prescient” and “prophetic” pepper the book – and it strikes me that “Sciascia” and “sciamano” – “shaman”, a mediator between visible and invisible worlds – may be at root related.
Shamans operate in the belief that they might heal malevolent forces: did Sciascia, faced with the social, cultural and political entropy of the 20th century, think such a thing possible? For much of his life, fatalism was tempered by an optimism, indebted perhaps to the Christianity he held at arm’s length, that considered revelation the first step on a brighter path. Towards the end of his life, however, after so much foreseen by him (and still ignored by others) had come to pass, pessimism – or realism – began to set in. After the maxiprocesso, “mega-trial”, of 1986-87, which, for the first time, proved in court that the Sicilian Mafia was a single, rigorously organised body, as opposed to a loose collection of criminals. After the hundreds of convictions that ensued. After the assassinated bodies of those who had helped to bring the convictions piled high; and after the reduction or repeal of many sentences all but proved political collusion.
Sciascia died in November 1989, which at least spared him the knowledge that Giulio Andreotti, the Christian Democrat prime minister long suspected of murder and Mafia involvement, would eventually get away with everything. It would not have surprised Sciascia; in his books, the killer is never caught and, as Moorehead points out, his pursuer is “defeated, not because he cannot solve the crime but because the state does not want him to”.
One result of telling four rich, intricately plaited stories is that A Sicilian Man becomes more crowded than the title suggests. Sometimes we lose sight of the man for pages at a time, his life swallowed in a weave of other stories of courageous magistrates and unscrupulous dons, each worth telling for the singular good or bad contributed to the world. Regrettably, but nevertheless in keeping with writing about Sciascia, Moorehead brushes past the poetry – after all, Sciascia’s first collection, La Sicilia, il suo cuore, in 1952, was also his last. Critics found the poems “fragile”, as if their author were “uncertain”. And yet, in that slim volume, in the vast, timeless, often people-less landscapes captured by a curious, detached eye, Sciascia told a truth more starkly than in the prose he went on to write: that if you look at something closely enough – the world, a country, your home town – all detail, human or otherwise, falls away. There is only ugliness and beauty, darkness and light, and it is not always possible to define the difference as clearly as you might wish.
A Sicilian Man: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul
Caroline Moorehead
Chatto & Windus, 320pp, £25
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This article appears in the 18 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Class warrior
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