ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a brief interpretation of the period of Italian sociopolitical turmoil known as the Years of Lead as the early warning symptom of what has been defined from time to time as the “Italian collapse”, the beginning of the “Bronze Age”, or, more bluntly, the “Italian disaster”. It builds on the combined effects of the assassinations of the prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in Palermo and the Bribesville scandal in Milan – but there is no guarantee there will be any empirical correlation between the several events. The chapter outlines the main traits of Mafia expansion at home and beyond their territories of origin. It explores the peculiarities of Mafia colonization of Central and Northern Italy, and the flywheel role they assumed in trickling down corruption. The chapter offers an Italy as a paradigm of “real existing democracy”.
