 |
| Santa Maria in Valverde, Palermo |
In the summer of 2018, I taught at a refugee center in Siracusa an afternoon seminar with a table full of teens who had survived the perilous journey across the Mediterranean, at least one of them from a scene in Libya so murderous that his picture of it centered on a machine gun. The curriculum I designed was a presentation of the graphic novel biography of Peppino Impastato by Marco Rizzo and Lelio Bonaccorso (BeccoGiallo 2018). The young men asked pointed questions about the story of anti-mafia activism on the part of Impastato, who called Palermo “mafiopolis” in his radio show and was murdered by the mafia in 1978. I told the students they could also see the life of Impastato portrayed in the classic film I cento passi (The Hundred Steps) (2000), by Marco Tullio Giordana.