That’s the reason why I considered (and consider) it essential to commemorate the epic of national unification, which was motivated by ideals, not just economic interests, based on a federalism of solidarity rather than a self-seeking federalism like the one the Lega Nord appeals to today. A movement which started in the South, an area torn by criminal organizations, a mirror of our entire country: a hush-up which seems more and more difficult to come to terms with. It’s been very difficult to talk about the North as a terrain invaded by the South’s mafia, because it is not easy to accept the idea that a large part of the Italian economy is determined in unfamiliar, backward southern villages rather than in the big, modern northern metropolises. The bandit Salvatore Giuliano used to say: ‘In città scivolo,’ in the city I can slip, meaning that your footing is steady on soil, whereas on pavement, in the cities, where everyone is unfamiliar, you can become disoriented and you’re likely to make mistakes. Platì, Casal di Principe, Africo, Corleone, Casapesenna, Natile Careri: these are the places from which most of Italy’s capital is controlled. It is here, in the villages, that rules are written and administered. Though they are economic rules, they are first and foremost cultural, and they reach as far as the cities, even in the North or all the way to Germany, as demonstrated by the Duisburg massacre in the summer of 2007. The same affiliation rites that are believed to pertain only to backward regions are replicated even in the North; identical rituals are performed in response to the same immutable code. It’s not just militant dynamics, but primarily cultural dynamics that are nurtured by practices that are atavistic, perennial, fixed, eternal. Rules adopted as a way of life, as a mechanism for being in the world. Rules that are the force behind Italy’s most powerful entrepreneurial factions: the ’Ndrangheta, the Camorra and the Cosa Nostra. It would be too simple to believe that all this is the result of medieval backwardness, profound ignorance and the absence of the State. Because there is no backwardness in a place where millions and millions of Euros flow in through drug trafficking. That’s precisely the crux of the matter: the highest degree of traditional archaic rule, combined with the highest degree of economic development. The Web, the market, finance, drugs, yet all governed by the rules of property, of downcast eyes, of arranged marriages, of virginity and blood.