Italians often complain that foreigners are obsessed by the Mafia, turning a localised problem of organised crime into a stereotype that damages the image of a whole nation. Yet as John Dickie, a historian of Italy at University College London, shows in this chilling and eye-opening book, the real problem is that the stereotype is correct.
The romanticisation of the Mafia by Hollywood may have been damaging, yet the worst and most corrosive romanticisation has been that by Italian cinema, television and literature, especially that of the 1950s and 1960s. The truth is squalid and tragic.
The point is not that all Italians are mafiosi, of course. Rather it is that the strength, scale and endurance of the country’s three main Mafias are sadly representative