Nando dalla Chiesa

"My earliest [memories of Palermo] are linked to the barracks on Corso Vittorio Emanuele, now named after my father, Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa. It is the headquarters of the Carabinieri Legion of sicily. At the end of the 1940s, my maternal grandfather was the commander, and I bear his name. Every summer, we would go to visit him. I remember his apartment and the stables. Then, in the late 1960s, I returned to that barracks as a teenager with my father, a Carabinieri colonel."

"In 1966, at the age of 17, I was struck by the sympathy that existed towards the Mafia. Even among my classmates at Garibaldi High School: when the boss Gerlando Alberti escaped a Carabinieri raid, many were happy and innocently took his side."

"I think that the mafia society has shrunk, but the pro-mafia society has expanded, that is, the society that manages to enter into synergy and convergence with the mafia for many reasons. In the North, we have been studying this worrying phenomenon for years."