Like Americans, Italians are inherently rebellious. If you are on a plane flight and a flight attendant complains about someone smoking a cigarette, savvy travelers know it's an Italian in the bathroom. It is part of the reason Americans love Italian people. Unlike Americans, Italians had to fight not only each other for over a thousand years, they had to fend off French and Germans and even Africans.
A good rebellion is still organized. America knew it and long before that, the Italians knew it better than anyone. Sometimes that organization starts with a family.
In "Naples 1343" by Amedeo Feniello (I was sent the translaton by Antony Shugaar out today) we get an exhaustive look at the secret history of organized crime in Italy. It isn't in Sicily proper, nor would you really expect it to be when the most famous acrimony was with the Lombards (Germans) and the French, but it was rebellion against social authoritarian government in the south.(1) People were worse off while wealthy elites in control of the weapons told them everything was fine.
It is a powder keg with a fuse ready to be lit to tell an Italian (or American) man watching his children starve that they are better off than ever. Or that only the large urban centers matters. And in the Naples kingdom things were dire. Nearly 900 towns had simply ceased to exist, because to address the famine problems that easily cropped up before the age of agricultural science, centralized government took over. People in the south were watching their food supply drained away to feed the north. Wealthier cities, like Parma, could buy what they needed. Peasants in the south could not.
To make matters worse, climate change in 14th century was like nothing recorded before or since. Every hurricane and hot day is a doomsday story in corporate media now but it was real doomsday then. And leaders then did what leaders in the US over the last few years did; they blamed the free market and greed and argued only more controls would help.
Morte Alla Francia Italia Anela - the death of France is the song of Italy.
"Mafia" is not an Italian word, it is not found in Romance languages until recently at all, and while there is disagreement it is an acronym, nothing else makes sense.
A French noble controlling an entire regions of starving Italians and being hated, that makes total sense.
And King Robert "The Wise" made the mistake elites often make and made again in America last week; he only cared about the large urban centers. He cared about his legacy. By the time he died, his kingdom was in a shambles and "the family" - Camorra, they would be called later - entered the margin of chaos that government had created. They targeted merchants, but not their allied merchants, they hijacked ships and earned loyalty from the people by distributing the food they stole. They were public enemies, according to nobles, but no one knew who they were.
Feniello knows and in "Naples 1343" he provides a comprehensive layout of the scientific, economic, and cultural milieu. It is in defiance of popular versions of Robert, which call him The Peacemaker and Wise, yet which he mostly did by maintaining the status quo and bringing in foreign traders. When he died, with people still hungry, the chaos was no longer in the margins, it was openly in the streets.
The French would seek to control Naples again and again, King Charles VIII did so in 1494, but the Papal States and Spain drove them out, and with it now under Spanish control, Italians had a new and different problem - but a criminal infrastructure that was much the same as 150 years earlier.
That is a book for another time.
NOTE:
(1) In the US election last week, voters issued a clear referendum on centralized control and right after the election was lost for the party in control, political allies like California Governor Newsom suddenly started talking populism about states' rights and that we are the United States of America, not a federal government that tells states what to do.
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