Inspector Sangiorgi and the Sicilian Mafia 1875-1877 - Professor John Dickie by UCL Institute of Advanced Studies

Inspector Ermanno Sangiorgi was the courageous Italian policeman who, in late 1875, first discovered the most important piece of evidence in the history of the mafia: the ritual that must be undergone by anyone seeking to become a Man of Honour.

In 2009 I unearthed a document in Sangiorgi's own hand that explains how the mafia took revenge against him. Sangiorgi tells a story rich in intrigue that takes us deep into the world of the early mafia, and explains how it came to be that Italy ignored the crucial significance of the mafia initiation ritual, and thus continued to believe that the mafia did not exist. Final judicial confirmation of the mafia's existence would only arrive in 1992.

Professor John Dickie (UCL School of European Languages, Culture and Society – Italian Department)
John Dickie was born in Dundee in 1963. In 1986 he graduated with a First in Modern Languages from Pembroke College Oxford, before going on to do an MA and D.Phil at Sussex. He was lecturer in Italian at Cardiff for two years before coming to UCL in 1993. His major research interests have included the Italian South, nationalism and national identity in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Italy, the history of Italian food, and the history of organized crime. His most recent book, published in 2011, is Blood Brotherhoods, a parallel history of Italy's three most important criminal organizations from their origins to the fall of Fascism.