What has always struck me about the bosses of the criminal organizations is their absolute spirit of sacrifice. It seems impossible, but how does a man hold out for decades against the 41-bis system, the state’s ‘hard prison regime’: being cut off entirely from all family friends and associates while in prison? You understand it when you see how they live when they are out free or hiding as a fugitive, forced to stay locked up in their bunkers. Being a mafioso means fabricating a life of unhappiness. If you are an associate you know that you will end up dead or in jail. This is the price you pay when you want true power, the kind that enables you to decide the life and death of everyone else. That’s why, before you build the house where you are going to live, you have to build a bunker, because you know that you can only live your life outside prison if you know how to go into hiding. Bunkers are a sign of misery and deprivation that is almost manifested architecturally, misery born of sacrifice and the self-perception of power.

Italy is the country that has the most bunkers in the world. In South America, drug traffickers hide in Amazonia, in what can be considered natural bunkers. In Italy, however, they are constructed, and people in Calabria and Caserta build the best bunkers in the world. Over and above being a hideout, the bunker is a philosophy of life, a concept that follows the logic of living in a constrained space, of never going out, of never seeing the light of day. Bunkers may be only as big as 100 square feet, the area of the inside of a car. They are minuscule lairs, impossible to find, where you live and command banks you will never enter, buy watches you will never wear, acquire cars you will never drive, while seeing your children once a year. And you’ll fill those lairs with things that in some way reflect you: religious images, porn magazines, cars and watches, demonstrating that the mafia’s power is more internal than external and doesn’t exist to be flaunted.

There are areas, like Locride in Calabria, where the bunker is part of everyday life for everyone. It is built with thoughts of the future; maybe it won’t be needed, but better to have one on the off chance. A bunker is already included in plans for a new home, as if provident parents were thinking about their children’s future by preparing a worry-free refuge. It can always come in handy for a relative, a brother-in-law … These hideaways are hard to find because, since most property is not registered at the Land Office, there is no complete toponymy of the region. So there are no maps, and the carabinieri (who have formed an ad hoc division to hunt them down) must rely on memory and their detailed knowledge of the territory.