“It seemed incredible that that little nocturnal paradise could be in the same city, in the same country, in the same hemisphere as the place where a group of killers had pressed a remote control twelve hours earlier, destroying men, things, and hopes.” Palermo, July 1983. The moon, the lapping of water, a stunning girl to discover, and the beginning of a story of intense feelings and passions. Palermo during the years of the mafia wars, a slaughterhouse city with a thousand dead. Palermo, where people desperately crave love so as not to succumb to the violence and mourning. There is all of this, and much more, in the pages of I cinque canti di Palermo by Giuseppe Di Piazza, published by HarperCollins. This is an extensive and much more mature rewriting of the first book by a talented author, a journalist with L’Ora in those awful, bitter-sweet days, and later with Il Messaggero and the Corriere della Sera. The protagonist is Leo Solinas, a restless but enterprising reporter, and a sort of alter ego of the author as a young man. And the stories he comes across, exposes and narrates are those of tragic but obstinate love affairs (between a boy from a mafia family who refuses to become a killer, and a girl from a middle-class family who is prepared to pay the price of terrible pain), of lives devastated by heroin, of “honest thieves” and of a serious, respectable doctor murdered by the mafia and defamed, for whom the truth would wait for almost thirty years before being uncovered. With Palermo always in the background, a city that causes so much pain but that is impossible not to love, even only in its absence and recollections.

I cinque canti di Palermo. Le prime indagini di Leo Salinas
Giuseppe Di Piazza
HarperCollins, 2020