A Mafia’s place turns into a peaceful agriturismo

For the series ONLY in Sicily as Sicily Scene called a post a few days ago, here is another story that a friend pointed out to me. This time the New York Times writes about this magical island. The article by Joshua Hammer describes how a Mafia’s place turns into a peaceful agriturismo. The agriturismo mentioned is Portella della Ginestra. I googled it and the results that came up are not for the agriturismo: they mostly lead to the so called Portella della Ginestra massacre. Portella della Ginestra is an agriturismo that is part of the project Libera Terra. This association’s main goal is to promote businesses that are mafia free.

It could have been the rural retreat of a hedge-fund magnate or an Italian prince: a two-story villa of beige stucco and stone, perched in isolation on a rise overlooking the Jato Valley in northern Sicily. The front doors opened onto a refurbished dining room with high ceilings, terra-cotta tile floors and a row of stone arches that suggested a Roman amphitheater. Antique brass lanterns, pottery and other curios hung from the walls. Soft light filtered through the windows. It was getting toward lunch, and in the spacious kitchen, three chefs were preparing dessert: miniature pastries made with honey and chestnuts cultivated in nearby orchards. A narrow staircase wound upstairs to the villa’s three rustic bedrooms, with 10 beds, each of which looked out upon pale-green meadows sloping upward toward bald-faced granite mountains.

In fact, this 17th-century farmhouse once belonged to Bernardo Brusca, the capo of one of Sicily’s most brutal crime families. A member of the Cupola, the Palermo commission that directed operations and settled disputes within the Cosa Nostra, Mr. Brusca may well have used the place as a safe house from which to plan killings and other crimes. Mr. Brusca’s son, Giovanni, now 51, detonated the bomb that blew up the Italian prosecutor Giovanni Falcone, in 1992; the next year, he kidnapped the 11-year-old son of a Mafia informer, held him for 26 months, then strangled him and dissolved his body in a barrel of acid. The younger Mr. Brusca later turned state’s evidence and went into a witness-protection program. Bernardo, a member of the Mafia old school that swore by omerta, organized crime’s code of silence, was captured in the 1980s, sentenced to multiple life terms for a string of murders, and died in government custody in 2004.

Acting under a law passed in 1996, the Italian government seized his properties and turned the farmhouse over to a consortium of municipalities in the area. Cooperativo Placido Rizzotto, named after a labor leader who was shot dead by the Mafia in 1948, was given the house six years ago. The cooperative now runs the property as a bed-and-breakfast and has turned Mr. Brusca’s neglected, overgrown fields into an organic farming commune.

“All the municipalities in the area were part of a long, violent mafioso history that they wanted to leave behind,” said Emiliano Rocchi, the head chef, who has worked there since the inn opened in 2004. “Turning these Mafia properties into socially beneficial projects is a way of doing that.”

The Brusca house, known as the Agriturismo Portella della Ginestra, was the first such Mafia property in Sicily to become a bed-and-breakfast, and it may have started a trend. Libera Terra Mediterraneo, an umbrella group of cooperatives founded a decade ago by an Italian priest, recently opened a second inn — once owned by the Sicilian boss of bosses, Salvatore Riina — across the Jato Valley and has announced plans for more. These former Mafia villas offer guests a chance to soak up the island’s most beautiful landscapes — and, perhaps, get a frisson of horror and excitement overnighting in places filled with ghosts from Sicily’s criminal past.

Read more at NYTimes.com