First anti-mafia lesson at Garibaldi high school in Palermo, June 1982

Last Updated: September 3, 2024

Palermo, giugno 1982, liceo Garibaldi: la prima «lezione» antimafia in una scuola del generale Dalla Chiesa

The phone call to the journalists came in the afternoon. “Tomorrow morning, someone go for a walk to the Garibaldi high school. Maybe there’s some news.” General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, appointed prefect of Palermo a month earlier, did not add anything else. There was no need.

The next day, he showed up without an escort in front of the school. No one had been informed of his arrival, except for the school administration who immediately gathered the students in the gym for an impromptu meeting. A back and forth between the students of the classical high school and the general who had defeated terrorism turned into a sort of “lesson” on the mafia. The first in a school in the city. Until that day, no representative of the institutions had spoken about legality and the fight against the mafia in schools. Only in the following years, some magistrates starting with Rocco Chinnici, founder of the anti-mafia pool, would continue on the path outlined by the prefect who decided to also meet the students of the Gonzaga institute, the Jesuit institute attended by the children of the city’s upper middle class.

“There is no need for someone to believe in, but something to believe in. I am with you and among you because I believe – without rhetoric – in your youth,” Dalla Chiesa addressed the students. “I still believe that there are values, especially because we are men and not numbers.”

Responding to the students’ unfiltered questions, even the most uncomfortable ones, Dalla Chiesa did not shy away from discussions about the relationship between the mafia and politics. “The mafia – he explained – attaches itself like a suction cup where there is power, so even to politics.” And he added, “The mafia is a way of being, a way of thinking that overwhelms anyone; we must fight it also by opposing the method of clientele, the practice of recommendation.”

“General, what have you come to do in Palermo? Do you really think you can defeat the mafia?” asked a student before the conclusion of the meeting. “I am like a flame that the State wanted to light in this beautiful capital that is Palermo,” Dalla Chiesa replied. It was June 3, 1982. Exactly two months later, on September 3, a Cosa Nostra commando extinguished that “flame” with Kalashnikov shots.