Gangs wearing white pointed hoods and robes returned to the alleyways of Corleone for the first time in 40 years yesterday as the Good Friday procession passed through the town once known as a mafia stronghold.

The sinister-looking hoods, known as capucci — from the cowls worn by Capuchin monks — are used in Easter processions in many Sicilian towns in a tradition which dates to the late Middle Ages and the Inquisition, when Sicily was under Spanish rule.

In Corleone, however, the hoods acquired even more sinister overtones because they were used by Mafia hitmen to conceal their identities. Police banned them after rival gangsters used the disguise to carry out vendettas.

The lifting of the ban came a year after the arrest of Bernardo Provenzano, the Mafia Godfather, or “boss of bosses”, at a dilapidated farmhouse just outside Corleone.

Nicolo Nicolosi, the mayor of Corleone, said: “We can give the citizens of our town back their self-respect and pride. We are free again.”

Sicilians traditionally mark Good Friday with processions in which confraternities — charitable “brotherhoods” — wind through the streets singing psalms and holding torches, banners and life-size crucifixes.

Corleone became famous after Mario Puzo gave the “boss of bosses” in his novel The Godfather the name Don Vito Corleone. The name acquired even greater notoriety after Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 film of The Godfather, in which the “Don” was played by Marlon Brando, and its sequel, The Godfather: Part II, with Robert de Niro in the role.

Provenzano, who was born in Corleone, had been on the run for 43 years. He is now in a maximum-security prison awaiting trial.

Yesterday police released a photofit of Provenzano’s presumed successor as Godfather, Matteo Messina Denaro, a Mafia boss from Trapani who is wanted for murder. Police said they had “aged” the only known photograph of Messina Denaro, and released two photofits, one showing him in sunglasses and one without.

Since Provenzano’s capture police have cracked down on organised crime in Sicily, using information gleaned from coded notes found at the Godfather’s refuge. This week police in Trapani arrested Bartolo Pellegrino, former deputy head of Sicily’s regional government, on charges of “Mafia association”, corruption and extortion.

He is accused of lending his support to Mafia-controlled businesses that built 600 flats in a protected area without planning permission while he was in office in 2001 and 2002.

Corleone, meanwhile, has become a tourist attraction, with sightseers photographing each other at the “Godfather’s hideaway”.

However, Piero Grasso, the chief antiMafia prosecutor in Palermo, said that the Mafia had not become less dangerous but had tightened its grip on “low-profile” criminal activities such as drugs and arms-running, protection rackets and construction contracts.

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