Corleone: the Sicilian town trying to break free of its mobster past

Mood is changing in town that spent half a century terrorised into silence under mafia bosses

If it weren’t called Corleone, this small, quaint town would appear to visitors as one of many others of the Sicilian hinterland: groups of elderly people strolling in a semi-deserted square, rows of low sand-coloured houses and a 16th-century church on the highest hill.

It would be difficult to imagine that for almost half a century it was the stronghold of the mafia’s bloodiest and most powerful clan, and the fiefdom of Italy’s most feared mobster, Totò Riina. Immortalised in cinema and literature by The Godfather, it became synonymous with organised crime, even if the bosses who once governed it – Riina, Luciano Leggio and Bernardo Provenzano – are now dead.