On May 9, 1978, Italians woke to sorrowful news reports about the murder of former Christian Democratic prime minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades. The same morning, in the small Sicilian town of Cinisi, the police found the body of Giuseppe “Peppino” Impastato, a young anti-mafia activist murdered by Cosa Nostra – the Sicilian mafia.

Impastato is commemorated each year as an example of young Italians’ fight against what was once the country’s most powerful criminal organization (and remains so in Sicily itself). Official memorialization presents this as a nonpartisan history that crosses political divides; this, even though Impastato’s own gravestone remembers a “revolutionary and communist militant killed by the Christian-Democratic mafia.”

This burial of the political character of the figures who have fought the mafia through the years has become a mainstay of public memory. It suits those who want to relegate this fight to a merely judicial matter – upholding legality – and ignore the social question behind it. Yet if for more than a century the mafia has waged war on rebellious peasants and farm laborers, communist and socialist militants, trade unionists and Communist members of parliament, the resistance against its control is equally political.