Felicia

impastato

“I didn't like Palermo, that's why I learned to love it. Because true love means loving what we don't like, so that we can change it. ”

“Hold your head high and keep your back straight.”

Felicia Impastato would always say this, with a smile, to everyone who came to her house in Cinisi—from all over. They came almost every day, so many, young and old, eager to meet her. Those visits made her forget the years when only a few people came to see her.

She would speak of her brave son who had renounced the mafia legacy of their family, to fight with his head held high and his voice loud against the mafia and local politicians.

When, on the morning of May 9, 1978, Peppino's shattered body was found (his corpse had been blown up with TNT on the Palermo-Trapani railway tracks, staged to look like a failed suicide bombing), Felicia became a civil party in the trial. It was a way to protect Giovanni, her surviving son, but above all, a way to seek justice for Peppino’s death.

With determination, Felicia exposed the mafia nature of the murder—a fact officially recognized in May 1984 by the investigating judge of the Palermo court.

She was born into a small middle-class family and married in 1947 to Luigi Impastato, a young man from a family of small-scale livestock breeders with ties to the local mafia. Felicia never accepted her husband's friendship with Gaetano Badalamenti, who later became the mafia boss of Cinisi. The conflict between the couple grew sharper when Peppino began his political activism. Felicia defended her son against her husband, even when he threw Peppino out of the house.

After her husband died in mysterious circumstances, and following the discovery of her son’s mutilated body, Felicia once again made a radical choice: she broke ties with her husband’s relatives, who advised her not to turn to the justice system, and instead chose to support Peppino’s comrades—the members of the Sicilian Documentation Center in Palermo, later named after Peppino. Most importantly, she opened her home to anyone who wanted to know more about her son.

At the trial against Badalamenti, twenty-two years after Peppino’s murder—after the investigation had been closed and reopened several times thanks to the commitment of Peppino’s friends and the Center named in his honor—Felicia, pointing directly at the accused and speaking with a firm voice, accused him of being the one who ordered the killing.