The days of sleeping with the fishes are all but gone. Francis Ford Coppola’s cliché Sicilian Mafioso, with flat cap, starched white shirt and a shotgun slung over his shoulder, is finally fading to black.

Sicily is slowly coming to terms with its tumultuous past, with the infamous Cosa Nostra being only one set of actors on a very crowded stage.

For centuries this craggy volcanic outcrop was the most important piece of real estate in the Mediterranean. It has been witness to the rise and fall of countless empires, from the Carthaginians, to the Greeks and Romans, to the Arabs, Normans and Spanish. It was often said, “To control Sicily, meant to control the Mediterranean.”

Today, the likes of author Mario Puzo’s jowly fictional character Don Corelone would be surprised to discover their hard-won strongholds are being turned over to holiday guests. Many of the estates once run by powerful godfathers like Toto Riina are now agro-tourism businesses where organisations like the collective Libera Terra – Free Land – have been putting confiscated mafia land to socially useful purposes since 1995.

“We make pasta from the land where Riina once lived,” said Luigi Ciotti, founder of Libera Terra. “From land that was so often soaked in blood we now grow produce for the benefit of the people who live here.”

However, Libera Terra is more than just about grain. A few miles south of Palermo in the small town of Monreale, known for its cathedral, it now has control of a large villa that once belonged to Giovanni Brusca, another of Sicily’s jailed mafia bosses, infamous for the orchestration of the assassination of a prominent anti-mafia investigator in 1992. Although still a working farm, the villa is a 10-bedroom inn banking on the eco-tourism trend for its success.

Standing among the estate’s vineyards, with craggy mountains rising in the background, it is difficult to reconcile the beauty of Sicily with its bloody history.

The seeds of the modern mafia were sown centuries ago when powerful families in the island’s rural countryside formed what can be called shadow governments, a response to the continual plunder of Sicily by outside forces. The mafia only took on the guise of organised crime at the end of the 19th century when more than a million Sicilians immigrated to the United States, where the mafia became urbanised and began to resemble the mob characters so popularly depicted in film and TV today.

However, the Sicilian Mafia got a further boost during the Second World War. With so many immigrants in the United States, the American military were quick to take advantage of the family ties that still existed. Characters like mafia kingpin Lucky Luciano, a New York mobster in jail for racketeering, allegedly helped the United States government with the allied landing in Sicily in 1943.

In return, Luciano and his cronies were given untouchable status; allowed to run their crime empire unhindered, a quid pro quo that lasted until the capture of the last boss of bosses, Bernardo ‘Bennie the Tractor’ Provenzano in 2006 after 40-years on the lam.

“I’ll give you a scoop,” whispered Nick Di Vita, owner of the agro-tourism resort of Baglio Fontana near Trapani. “Provenzano would never have escaped capture for so long without the collusion of both the Italian and American governments. He was the last of the Untouchables and was only apprehended because the politics changed.”

Although the mafia are still active in Sicily, the fear and favour that it once mustered are no longer defining characteristics of Sicilian life. A younger, better educated and more media savvy generation of Sicilian now inhabit the island and are determined to give control back to the electorate. It hasn’t been without its losses however, a number of judges who confronted the mafia through the courts since the early 1990’s have lost their lives in mob hits.

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