RITA ATRIA: THE ANTI-MAFIA GIRL

Born into a Sicilian mafia family in the 1970s, Rita Atria defied the fate that Cosa Nostra had mapped out for her simply because she was a woman. Here is part of her story.

The anti-mafia girl: Rita Atria

The outskirts of Rome on Sundays are religiously silent. In winter, the city takes on a gray hue, cloaked in a constant mist, and people rarely venture into the streets. In summer, it is unbearably sunny, exhausting, and the shadows cast by the buildings are not enough to withstand the heat radiating from the concrete—those who can, flee the Eternal City. Apartment windows are usually left open in hopes that a breeze might cool the rooms, but air circulation is scarce in narrow streets unless one lives on the upper floors.

Rita had been living in Rome for about a year, but she had only been in the seventh-floor apartment at 23 Via Amelia for a few days. Before that, she had lived with her sister-in-law and niece, all of them Sicilian, from the island’s southeast. Rita—who sometimes went by Gabriele, other times Margot, and even Vanessa—was seventeen and a protected witness of the Italian state. She fled the island after deciding to tell the justice system everything she knew about the mafia activities in her hometown—knowledge she had acquired largely because her father, Don Vito, had orchestrated much of it. He had close ties to the Aragón mafia family and a good relationship with the Onofrios, the other dominant clan in the region. Don Vito saw himself as part of the “traditional mafia,” one governed by an unbreakable, unquestionable code of values, which “resolved conflicts” and collected money in exchange for a service it had self-appointed to offer in the absence of the state. But Don Vito refused to accept the changes that parts of the organization were undergoing. He was killed in 1985 when Rita was only eleven years old. Though he had maintained good standing with the two mafia families and was respected for his opinions, his strong opposition to the mafia’s involvement in international drug trafficking was a liability the criminal market would not tolerate.

The gunshots that ended Rita’s father's life triggered a long, slow, and painful descent into agony. Her suffering, however, had begun at birth. Rejected by her mother even in the womb, she endured abuse and disdain throughout her early life—partially buffered by her father's presence. But with his murder, a new plan, desire, and perceived duty emerged: revenge, which her brother Nicolò believed he was destined to carry out. His sense of responsibility fluctuated over the next six years. That chaotic period of obsession, rage, makeshift plans, and disarray led to multiple deaths in Nicolò's circle—among them, his wife Piera and their daughter Vita María. When Nicolò's obsession with vengeance seemed to wane, the same people who had murdered his father decided to end any future attempts by him to fulfill that vendetta. On June 24, 1991, four assassins armed with pistols and Soviet-made Kalashnikov rifles stormed into Pizzeria Europa in the small coastal town of Montevago, where Nicolò was working. Two stayed in the dining room; the other two headed straight to the kitchen. Wearing ski masks, they stepped into the cramped kitchen where Nicolò and Piera were. As Piera whispered “Nico,” he sensed their presence, turned around, and pleaded, “Don’t touch my wife.” The 7.62 mm bullets from the rifle tore into the refrigerator, the microwave, the tomato sauce bottles—into Nicolò’s shoulder and chest, dropping him instantly. One of the gunmen then took a few steps forward, stood over Nicolò’s corpse, looked at Piera, who was silently watching the grotesque scene, and shot Nicolò in the head. It was all over in less than a minute.The killers fled. The customers in the restaurant chased after them. Piera, still stunned, gazing at her husband’s lifeless body surrounded by shattered dishes, pasta, tomato sauce, and blood, walked out of the kitchen, crossed the dining room, got into the car, and drove to her parents’ house: “Nicolò is dead. They shot him in front of me.”

Rita’s desolation grew deeper by the day. The hole in her soul expanded in rhythm with the pumping of her heart. Her father was gone. Her brother was gone. The mafia to which they had belonged had cast them out. Her older sister lived in Milan with her husband, and at sixteen, Rita found herself abandoned with a mother who had despised her since before she was born. Piera had no ties whatsoever to the mafia. She knew about it the way any Sicilian woman of any era did—and had no desire for revenge. Fleeing from her house and her mother, Rita began meeting with her sister-in-law and niece nearly every day after her brother’s murder. She would listen to Piera speak in a strange state of peace—unshaken, emotionless, anesthetized. On one of those routine afternoons, where Piera’s calmness clashed with Rita’s agitated and talkative nature, their tender confrontation was suddenly interrupted. Rita had called Piera’s house. Her mother answered and announced flatly that her daughter had left town and would not return for several days. Piera had contacted a Carabinieri officer first, then the prosecutor Morena Plazzi. She wanted to prevent any act of vengeance and instead steer their fate toward justice, offering detailed information on the crimes committed by her late husband, her late father-in-law, and all those connected to them—directly or indirectly.

Piera was not the first mafia widow—a heavy label and social role that many Sicilian women bore—who had chosen to cooperate with the justice system. Others had done it before, but they were few. After several days, Piera called her sister-in-law and said simply: “I’m not in Sicily, and I will never return. I went to the police and spoke to the judges. I told them everything I know.” The words traveled from the phone into Rita’s ear, entered her mind, and began pounding in her skull. She wasn’t shocked—she simply couldn’t fully process what was happening. Images of mutilated bodies flashed through her memory, short-circuiting both her disgust and her potential admiration for what her sister-in-law had done. Perhaps it was the lingering memory of other mafia collaborators' fates, as shown on the front pages of newspapers: the ten relatives of Tommaso Buscetta—including two of his sons; the mother and sister of Marino Mannoia; the thirty-five family members of Salvatore Contorno.

Rita with a toy belonging to her niece Vita María.

Piera testified before the justice system, and she had to do so in front of a tall, partially bald, gray-haired man who smoked one cigarette after another—someone who, according to Piera, used expressions and had a tone of voice eerily similar to those she had so often heard back in Partanna. That tall, partially bald, gray-haired man was Sicilian. He knew many mafiosi because he had grown up in Palermo during the 1950s and ’60s and had managed to imprison over three hundred of them in a landmark trial known as the Maxiprocesso. When Paolo Borsellino heard Piera nervously say, “Your voice sounds like a mafioso’s,” he laughed aloud but quickly calmed her by introducing himself as the life and work companion of the now-legendary Giovanni Falcone—the hero of citizens longing for an honest fight against the mafia. Piera’s demeanor changed immediately; she became extremely respectful and distant. Every sentence she directed to Borsellino was preceded by “Honorable” or “Your Honor,” until Paolo interrupted with a teasing tone: “With all due respect, I used to be a mafioso and now I’m ‘Honorable’? Speaking on behalf of the category, I’d certainly abstain from being called Honorable. I’m just a simple prosecutor. Call me Paolo, but don’t call me Honorable.” That same day, it was decided that Piera would be transferred to Rome to live under the witness protection program—an initiative largely shaped by Falcone and Borsellino themselves.

Once settled in the Italian capital with her daughter Vita Maria, living in relative peace and building a fragile yet rewarding life far from Sicily, the mafia, and the widowhood the old customs had reserved for her, Piera resumed phone contact with her teenage sister-in-law Rita. During one of those long, vague, but emotionally heavy conversations, Rita—repeatedly begging for permission to visit Rome—suddenly cut off Piera as she was explaining the restrictions police imposed on protected witnesses: “I don’t want to visit you. I want to testify.” Piera didn’t pause for long; instead, silence overwhelmed her. When she finally found the words, she said: “You know what that means. You’ll never be able to return to Sicily.” Rita confirmed her decision. She was resolute, and no inquisitive question could make her change her mind.

The weeks that followed were filled with nerves, anxiety, and uncertainty. Days passed, and the same officer who had brought Piera to Prosecutor Morena Plazzi told Rita to wait. She was underage—perhaps when she turned seventeen in two months, the Italian justice system could hear her and assess the information she wished to share. Her exhaustion, impatience, and the constant abuse from her mother made any further delay unbearable—especially after Piera’s testimony had led to the arrest of ten mafiosi in Partanna. In October 1991, the newspaper La Repubblica published the headline: “Piera Aiello – Atria. The Mafia Killed Her Husband. The Widow Now Challenges the Clans.” The shock in Partanna was silent, but absolute. Rita’s mother screamed at the few people who still spoke to her, insisting she had never liked her daughter-in-law, that she was a whore who had brought disgrace to the family. Even Rita’s boyfriend stopped speaking to her: “I can’t be seen with the sister-in-law of a snitch.”

Just two days later, after renewed, repeated, desperate calls, Rita finally found herself face to face with Prosecutor Morena Plazzi. Like Piera before her, she began to testify: “I am the sister of Nicolò Atria, murdered in Montevago on June 24, 1991. I present myself to Your Honor with the intention of providing some information I know regarding the events and circumstances related to my brother’s murder, as well as the earlier murder of my father, which occurred in Partanna in 1985. I also wish to share general information about the environment in which these events took place. I remember that my father was nicknamed ‘The Doctor,’ because in Partanna, he played the role of a peacemaker…” Rita expelled the words. The police officer typing could barely keep up with the pace of her voice. As she spoke, her mind raced through everything that was happening to her, everything that was changing. Her friends—or rather, acquaintances—those who had once surrounded her when her father was The Doctor of Partanna, were now her pursuers. Her worst fears had taken the shape of people she once greeted, kissed, hugged, and occasionally trusted.

On the morning of November 21, 1991, Rita woke up, had breakfast, and packed her bag for hospitality school. The night before had been terrifying. A former employee of her father’s—someone who had been with Vito the day he was killed more than six years earlier—had come to her door asking to speak with her. Rita turned him away. Minutes later, she heard the sound of a car driving off. She was convinced they were going to kill her. In her private diary, which she had been filling with anecdotes, fears, and the few joys she had left, she poured out the dread of that night: “I hope this isn’t the last time I write in this notebook.” Her mother accompanied her to the bus stop. The same schoolbag as always—some books and her diary. But Rita never made it to school. She got off the bus in Montevago, walked into the police station, and reported the visit from the night before. That same day, Rita left Sicily for good. Paolo Borsellino, the prosecutor in Marsala, determined she could not afford to take another risk. In less than twenty-four hours, the piccirilla—the little girl—was on a plane to Rome, on her way to live under witness protection with her sister-in-law Piera.

One of Rita's many Sundays on the beaches of Ostia.

Rita’s life changed instantly. She was now in the capital of the country. But for her, Rome might as well have been the capital of another world—it had nothing in common with Partanna. She couldn’t even begin to understand how both places existed within the same territory, or how all their inhabitants could share something as close and distant as a national identity. The two women were happy. They were together, unafraid, focused only on the future, living in a cosmopolitan city and doing things that Sicilian women—especially widows or orphans of the mafia—could never even imagine. They went to the gym, to the beautician, and Rita, who dyed her hair red, also dared to wear shorts her mother would never have allowed. “You look like a whore,” her mother would’ve said. Rita knew about the mafia. Rita was confronting the mafia, and by extension, her family. She was risking her life—battered, despised, and marked with more scars than gestures of affection—but it was a life nonetheless. But Rita was also a teenager. The walls of her new room in Rome were covered with photos of Eros Ramazzotti. Her drawers were filled with makeup and colorful clothes. In Rome, for the first time, Rita felt like a teenager.

Though life in Rome was new and hopeful, it was also orchestrated by police and prosecutors. The extended family of Piera, Rita, and Vita Maria were the police officers who, every so often, would move them to different “safe houses.” When life in one house, one neighborhood, with a certain circle of people became too routine, the rules of the witness protection program required dismantling that routine. “The mafiosa in a skirt,” as the officers nicknamed her, began to testify. Rita was determined to cooperate with justice, to help prosecute those who had betrayed and killed her father and brother. Yet she still couldn’t fully understand the world beyond the mafia. When speaking with authorities, she often found herself defending the old mafia—the one her father had belonged to, the one he was proud of, and which she, out of love for him, was proud of too. The prosecutors' questions began to unravel that structure—the only one she had ever known and the one she clung to in a desperate attempt not to be completely stripped of her past, her culture, her affections, her traditions. Follow-up questions upset her. Rita was torn apart by the indirect attacks on the very tradition she was renouncing—but that was still hers. During one of these conversations, she came across a quote from Giovanni Falcone: “If we really want to fight the mafia, we must not turn it into a monster, nor even into an octopus or a cancer. Instead, we must acknowledge that it resembles us.” That phrase marked a turning point for Rita. Her testimonies about mafia activities in Partanna began to point fingers at the people closest to her heart. Days later, Rita would write in her diary: “Before fighting the mafia, you must first do a self-examination of conscience, and only after defeating the mafia inside yourself, can you fight the mafia among your friends. The mafia is us and our bad behavior.”

Rita lived better in Rome. She did teenage things—things that made her happy. But she was losing her past. She began to understand what her father, her brother, even her teenage boyfriend had done—and she condemned it. And that condemnation shattered her foundations. Her mother now despised her more openly, suspecting she was cooperating with the authorities. Her older sister avoided talking to her. Rita lived with Piera and her niece, but they weren’t her family. They weren’t part of her structure. Rita had demolished her past. “It’s almost nine at night. I feel sad and demoralized. Maybe it’s because I can’t dream anymore—my eyes see nothing but darkness. I’m not afraid of dying, but I know I’ll never be loved by anyone. I’ll never be happy or see my dreams come true. I wish I could have Nicolò near me, feel his caresses, his hugs—I need them so much. All I can do is cry, but I miss you so much, Nicolò. No one will ever understand the emptiness I carry inside—an unbridgeable void that has slowly grown larger. I have nothing and no one left, only crumbs. I can’t tell right from wrong. Everything feels so dark and sordid now. I thought time could heal all wounds, but it doesn’t. Time just opens them wider, until it kills me slowly. When will this nightmare end?”.

Excerpt from a video of Rita's meeting in Rome.

Beyond the nightmare of loneliness, Rita also had to face her mother again every time she returned to Sicily to testify. The police would reunite Rita with her mother on each trip. Rita was still a minor, and her mother had accused the authorities—especially Paolo Borsellino—of kidnapping her daughter. These encounters became suffocating ordeals for Rita. It was as if she were submerged underwater, gasping for air, arms flailing desperately to reach the surface—while her mother pushed her deeper and deeper, intensifying her anguish and despair. “I fed you, I clothed you—even though I was alone, a poor widow…” For Rita, it was difficult to defend herself. Her mother’s attacks spiraled endlessly, and Rita responded as best she could—with honest words weighed down by the pain of who they were directed at. The only time Rita felt protected—truly protected, like she hadn’t felt since her father was murdered—was when Paolo Borsellino was present during these reunions. He could stop her mother. He was the one her mother feared, and that fear prevented her from escalating her violence against Rita. “Rituzza, don’t be angry. One day your mother will understand what you're doing. And until then, I'm with you. You're not alone.” With Paolo beside her, Rita could breathe again. He pulled her to the surface. Every time Paolo met with Piera, Rita, and Vita Maria, something extraordinary happened. He would arrive with candies for the youngest of the women, let her draw at his desk, and chat with the two women outside of official matters. In addition to meeting in person, they could call him on the phone whenever they needed.

Piera, Rita, and her niece kept changing houses. They kept traveling back to Sicily to remember, in painful detail, the deaths that surrounded them over seventeen years. In the midst of that declarative purgatory, Rita fell in love. A young military cadet won her over after spotting her at the Vatican Museums. To Gabrielle, Rita wasn’t “Rita.” When he eventually learned her story, he accepted it immediately and gently led the piccirilla into a kind of paradise. Rita fell in love completely. Gabrielle did too. But for Rita, he was a lifeline—a plank to cling to in the middle of an endless ocean. He bore no resemblance to her past, but he might be her immediate future—the one she had to try to build in order to survive.

On May 23, 1992, Italy was plunged into panic. The mafia continued to kill. Journalists and Sicilians said Palermo had turned into Beirut—Lebanon's long civil war had ended only recently—and that day, the Sicilian mafia assassinated Giovanni Falcone, his wife—Judge Francesca Morvillo—and three of his bodyguards. A bomb tore a crater in the highway—and in the soul of everyone who suffered under and fought against the mafia. Paolo Borsellino, who arrived minutes later at the hospital where Falcone had been taken, held his friend's hand and accompanied him through his final moments. Days later, Paolo would say that Falcone had started dying years earlier— when they attacked him for his commitment to fighting the mafia, when they denied him resources and support to develop the very tools he'd spent over a decade building. 

Rita and Piera watched the funeral of Giovanni, Francesca, Vito, Rocco, and Antonio—the three bodyguards—on TV. They couldn’t stop searching the screen for Paolo, who remained near Giovanni’s casket as if trying, in vain, to shield him from further harm. Paolo’s tears never fully fell, but they welled up slowly, blurring his vision and revealing a shattered soul. After Giovanni's assassination, Rita wrote in her diary several times a day: “The only way to eliminate this plague is to raise awareness among the children who grow up around the mafia. To show them that there’s another world out there—one made of simple but beautiful things, of purity. A world where you’re treated for who you are, not for whose child you are or for the bribes you’ve paid. Maybe a truly honest world will never exist—but who stops us from dreaming? Maybe if each of us tries to change, maybe we’ll succeed.”

For the people of Palermo, the capital of Sicily had become Beirut.

Paolo desperately sought to join the investigation into Giovanni’s murder. He tried to fill his friend's vacant post in Rome and to interview as many pentiti—former mafiosi turned collaborators—as possible, hoping to open or close every case he could get his hands on. Years later, Agnese, Paolo’s wife, would recount that on the morning of July 18, while walking along the beach with Paolo—just the two of them, without bodyguards, like when they were young—her husband had told her: "It won’t be the Mafia who kills me. It will be others—and it will happen because someone allows it, and among them… a colleague, too." On July 19, after a family gathering and a visit to a friend, Paolo set out for an appointment he had arranged just moments earlier—with his mother. He told her he would stop by in the afternoon, at her apartment on Via Mariano d'Amelio 21, a dead-end street that mostly served as parking for nearby residents. At that very building—allegedly under police protection due to the high risk of being related to the Mafia’s main enemy—a Fiat 126 packed with hundreds of kilograms of TNT had been parked days earlier. The car bomb had been planted by the Sicilian Mafia in collaboration with corrupt members of Italy’s secret services, who at the time were negotiating with the Cosa Nostra in an attempt to halt the bloodshed. Paolo arrived at 4:58 p.m. in a three-car convoy with his six bodyguards. The bomb was triggered remotely—some versions still claim it was wired to the apartment’s intercom—and exploded right outside the home of the Mafia’s most feared enemy’s mother. The blast tore through everything, obliterating Paolo Borsellino and five of his six escorts: Emanuela Loi, Agostino Catalano, Vincenzo Li Muli, Walter Eddie Cosina, and Claudio Traina.

It was Sunday, July 19. As they often did on weekends, Rita, Piera, and Vita Maria had planned a beach day in Ostia, a few kilometers from Rome. They had access to Gabrielle’s car—he was away on a mission in Albania and had left it at their disposal. Rita’s relationship with Gabrielle had become official. The police knew; they had checked his background. Rita had even requested an apartment to move out of her sister-in-law’s home and start living with her boyfriend. But that day, torrential rain kept them indoors. Around 6 p.m., Piera called her father, like she did every Sunday evening. “How are you all doing?” he asked. The way he used “you all” made Piera suspicious. “We’re fine. Why?” she replied. Then came the news she never thought she’d hear: “They killed Borsellino.” Piera dropped the phone and collapsed into herself—curling up on the floor as if trying to disappear into an invisible womb, the only place a mammal instinctively believes itself to be truly safe. Rita rushed from the other room: “What happened? Did something happen to your dad?” From her imaginary, nonexistent but protective womb, Piera answered: “No. They killed Borsellino.”

Rita stepped back and stared at Piera from the logical vantage point of someone standing while the other lay curled on the floor. She looked down at her—hurt and accusatory. “I don’t believe it.” She turned and returned to her room. She kept getting dressed for the outing with her friends that she had planned. She did her hair, applied makeup, and went out. To Rita, Paolo wasn’t dead. And she lived accordingly. In the days following the Via D’Amelio massacre, Rita refused to turn on the TV or read the newspapers. She focused instead on caring for her sister-in-law, who was now on tranquilizers due to a nervous breakdown. Rita handled the household, prepared meals, looked after little Vita Maria. But shadows—cast by a light that no longer existed—slowly consumed her. “It’s over. Now there’s no one left to protect us.”

After the murder of Falcone and now Borsellino, many state collaborators began backing out. If the State had failed to protect its most prominent targets, how could it protect them? They began requesting to retract their previous statements, hoping in vain that the Mafia bosses might spare them—or their families. The judicial authorities also reached out to Piera and Rita. They all but invited them to withdraw their testimonies. Both women refused. Rita replied: “Now I have even more reasons to keep fighting.” They also informed her that her request for an apartment to live with Gabrielle had been approved. But for Rita, the news fell flat. She was drowning in ever-deepening shadows. “Now that Borsellino is gone, no one can understand the void he’s left in my life. Everyone is afraid, but the only thing I fear is that the mafia state will win— that they’ll keep killing more poor fools who fight windmills. Borsellino, you died for what you believed in. But without you, I am already dead.”

One of the last photos of Rita Atria.

On July 24, Piera and Rita had to move again. They were used to it by now—but this time, Rita would have her own apartment. They were relocated to the Tuscolano district, on the outskirts of Rome. Rita was assigned a unit on the seventh floor. Spacious, nice, ordinary—almost identical to all the other apartments rented out by those tasked with protecting justice witnesses. A bedroom, a living room, an open-plan kitchen, a bathroom, and windows facing the street. Only five days had passed since Paolo’s assassination, and Piera didn’t want to leave her sister-in-law alone—or maybe she didn’t want to be left alone without her. She convinced Rita to come over, have a drink together, and chat like they had done so many nights before. Rita hesitantly agreed. During the evening, Rita told Piera she wouldn’t be flying to Sicily with her the next day: “I’m staying in Rome.” The two Sicilian women had planned a trip to Sicily to spend a few days with Piera’s parents. “I don’t want to go. I’d rather stay here and start putting things in order.” Piera was upset. She didn’t want Rita to be left alone, and she didn’t want to cancel her flight. The night became heavy. Alongside Rita’s refusal to travel, many of the thoughts she had kept in her diary began to surface. Rita started talking about death. She spoke of it as if it were something normal for a seventeen-year-old. And in her case, it was. A Sicilian teenager, born into the Mafia, left alone from a very young age, and constantly losing the few safe harbors she managed to build for herself. “When I die, my coffin should be made of light-colored wood. Just dress me in a black suit, with a white shirt and a red bow tie. And you must give me a heart of red roses with a white lily in the center.” Piera, uncharacteristically, shouted at her: “What the hell are you talking about? Why don’t you think about the beautiful things waiting for you, Rituzza? Please, don’t be so low.”

In Sicily, the heat was oppressive. Piera and her mother were talking in the hotel lobby. Through the hotel door came magistrates Morena Plazzi and Alessandra Camassa, accompanied by a couple of police officers. Piera and her mother froze. Fear and cold sweat covered every inch of their bodies in a single second. The scorching temperature clashed with the cryogenic stillness in their muscles, leaving them paralyzed. Piera’s body, thoughts, and emotions erupted all at once when she heard the words: “Rita killed herself.” The next day, Piera flew back to Rome with Magistrate Camassa and her father. During the entire flight, she blamed herself for having left Rita alone. She should have seen it coming. Rita had spent the entire previous night speaking of death as though it were someone she’d known forever—her most faithful travel companion, her only one, in fact. When Piera arrived in Rome, she went directly to the morgue—to fulfill Rita’s last wish. She dressed her in a black suit, a white blouse, and a red bow tie. Then she went to Rita’s apartment. Boxes, bags, clothes, photos, and the few belongings of the piccirilla—the little one—were still untouched, just as they had been the day they moved in. The home was frozen in time, still in July 24, 1992—the day of the move. A day like so many others, when Rita could think of nothing but death. There was just one exception. Next to the window from which Rita had thrown herself, a message had been written in pencil on the wall: “I love you. I can’t live without you. Goodbye. It’s over.”

Rita’s death began many years earlier. Perhaps like it does for all of us—with the first breath we take. But with death as her constant companion, the journey was accelerated. Rita was wounded by the murder of her father and brother. She began to agonize with the death of Giovanni Falcone. And she died with the assassination of Paolo Borsellino. Rita had been bleeding inside since she was eleven years old. She chose to end the agony six years later.

Rita thank you were the signs on the streets of Partanna on the first anniversary of her death.

Rita’s body was buried in the cemetery of Partanna. The piccirilla returned to Partanna, but this time surrounded by love and affection from people she had never known. The women of Palermo organized a silent march from the town square to the cemetery. Under Sicily’s aggressive summer sun, women from every corner of the island came to Partanna and led the procession. Women who were somehow part of the Mafia. Widows, orphans, mothers, sisters, aunts, and nieces of people murdered by the Mafia. Some, like Piera and Rita, who didn’t want to be anything defined by the Mafia. Others who had lost a loved one simply for being in the way of the Mafia’s path—or better said, its bullets. Many of them had carried Rita’s coffin a year earlier. Women who had been left alone walked through the streets of Partanna under the watchful gaze of men who stared at them like a sideshow crossing town. Each woman held a red rose in her hand. Some held signs that read: “Rita, always with us.” Piera couldn’t attend either the funeral or the first anniversary, but every time she traveled to Sicily to testify, she would secretly visit the cemetery, leaving flowers for her husband and her sister-in-law.

Rita, unconsciously, became an example to many, especially to other women. But just as her life had never been easy, neither would her death be. On the second of November, the Day of the Dead, her mother—who hadn’t attended the funeral or the burial—entered the cemetery, as so many others did that day. Dressed in black, as she had been for over six years—the way a Mafia widow should be—she carried a handbag and walked to the grave of her husband, her son, and her daughter. Rita’s tomb was marked with a marble plaque in the shape of an open book, with her photo and the inscription: “The truth lives.” Her mother opened her purse, pulled out a hammer, and began destroying the gravestone that bore her daughter’s name. Shards of marble scattered across the ground. Rita’s photo now bore the marks of iron, violently striking her image. Her mother had chosen that day so all of Partanna could see her. She needed to show that, above all, she was a Mafia widow.

Rita was a seventeen-year-old woman, born into the Mafia by fate—or by a curse no one could name. She was a woman who had been forced to grow up in childhood, who had to understand that even from her mother’s womb, she was in danger. Rita lived only as much as she could. She endured her suffering for as long as she could. And in the middle of that hellish path, Rita chose to do what was right. Today, streets, cooperatives, schools, and community centers across Italy bear her name. May the love she so desperately sought—but never truly found—remember her. Whether as the “Mafia woman in a skirt”, or, as she most preferred, Paolo Borsellino’s piccirilla.