Midnight in Sicily: A Journey Through Crime, Art, Food and Corruption
About this ebook
Beginning with the trial of seven-times Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti for alleged Mafia involvement, Peter Robb enters a Sicily where politics, organised crime, culture and everyday life cannot easily be separated.
Moving through Palermo and across southern Italy, Midnight in Sicily combines investigation with history, art, literature and food. Robb follows the long entanglement of Cosa Nostra with political and economic power, from post-war Sicily to the assassinations of anti-Mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino and the trials and revelations that followed.
Markets, meals, painting and writing are essential to Robb’s understanding of the island. Leonardo Sciascia, Renato Guttuso and the physical life of Palermo sit alongside judges, politicians and Mafia bosses.
The result is a dark, sensual portrait of Sicily and a searching account of how corruption survives by becoming part of the systems meant to contain it
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About the author
Peter Robb is an Australian author. He was born in the Toorak, Melbourne in 1946 and has lived in Australia, New Zealand, Italy and Brazil. His first book, Midnight in Sicily, won the Victorian Premier's Literary Prize for non-fiction in 1997.
His second book, M, a biography of the Italian artist Caravaggio, provoked controversy on its publication in Britain in 2000. A Death in Brazil, his fourth novel, was named The Age's non-fiction book of the year for 2004. He has taught at the University of Melbourne, the University of Oulu in Finland and the Instituto Universitario Orientale in Naples.
