#Boston underpass art cut down on crime series#

The villas of Sicilian and Camorra bosses, for example, were designed to communicate power from an aesthetic standpoint – majestic villas that resemble those of princes or grand dukes. Mafiosi villas reflect the personality of the residents and the character of the clan they represent. Things change when the bosses build their own homes. Thousands have been confiscated or seized and the ruins of others are spread over 17 miles of beach – like archaeological artefacts from a post-apocalyptic disaster. In Castel Volturno, about 30 miles northwest of Naples in a landscape of uncommon beauty between Mount Dragone and the island of Ischia, 24,000 illegal constructions have been built, many on the seashore. Today, Pizzo Sella, known as the “hill of dishonour” is a place of slowly decaying skeletons of 170 villas, some of which were confiscated by the authorities, but never razed, and which have become an open-air rubbish heap occupied by rats – a deep scar on one of the most beautiful promontories in Sicily.Īrchitecture for the mafia is not just a display of power, but also a highly profitable business for the clans, which, thanks to corruption in the public works sector and construction firms directly or indirectly linked to organised crime, have amassed millions over the years supplying building materials and “unfortified concrete” – comprising a disproportionate amount of sand and water, and very little cement – to build streets, schools, hospitals and bridges in places prone to landslides or flooding, along cliffs, and in high-risk hydrogeological and seismic areas.

#Boston underpass art cut down on crime series#

Half had been built and the other half remained unfinished.Ī scene from the TV crime series Gomorrah, which was inspired by the Camorra clans. When the authorities began to investigate the scheme, it was already too late. According to prosecutors, Greco gave his blessing for the construction of 314 illegal villas here. The sack of Palermo is perhaps the most classic example of how the Sicilian mafia has not only murdered and impoverished, but also tarnished the landscape through construction projects that, after having taken the money for their completion, were usually left unfinished.Īt the end of the 1970s, the mafia super boss Michele Greco, nicknamed “the Pope”, and head of the Cupola, the Cosa Nostra’s governing body, fixed his ambition on Pizzo Sella, a splendid cape on the gulf of Palermo that dominates the city and the beach in Mondello. Like plundering barbarians, mafiosi devastated the city with cement, disfiguring its parks, landscape and natural beauty Maurizio Carta, academic And there one can see what is the mafia by looking at the shameless, gaudy villas of bosses, each one a demonstration of strength, just like monarchies and dictatorships. Evidence of the mafia lies in the replacement of exquisite 19th-century residences with concrete blocks, and in the dozens of unfinished and dilapidated constructions on the shores of spectacular beaches, where mobsters with ties to public administrators were permitted to build.

The Observer travelled to Italy’s southern regions with a history of organised crime. Ciancimino, who was neither an artist nor an architect, authorised the construction of 4,000 apartment blocks in Palermo, almost half of which were built by companies with direct ties to Cosa Nostra clans. Because mafia architecture, like all activities of the clans, has its own syntax, logic and function.īernini designed the splendid Fountain of the Four Rivers in Rome’s Piazza Navona and St Peter’s Square. Mobsters changed the shape of Italian cities, ravaging landscapes with concrete to affirm their authority. Three centuries after Pope Urban VIII entrusted the architectural and urban planning of the Catholic church to Gian Lorenzo Bernini to represent the Vatican as a triumphal force, the mafia was using architecture to display its power. He adds: “The bosses also sent a message to the thousands of citizens who were homeless after the second world war: if those families had found a home, it was thanks to the mobsters.” With those towering constructions built along the coast and at the foot of the mountains, Palermo became a hot, muggy, suffocating city.” “Palermo had been built to allow the breeze to rebound off the mountains and swirl back down to cool the city. “They sent a message to the institutions, making it clear that they, the bosses, had the power to change not only the laws that regulated the urban planning projects and the shape of the city, but also the local climate. “With the sack of Palermo, the mafia exhibited its enormous criminal power,” says Carta. Palermo’s skyline is now dominated by brutalist tower blocks after the mafia’s demolition of the city’s grand art nouveau mansions.