The Borgo Piano

Swift and ruthless justice was delivered in a broad plaza to the north of Corleone.

When Republicans in Sicily revolted, their insurrection was put down violently by King Ferdinand’s military battalions. Several of those involved, including two who survived the crackdown, had ties to one of the earliest documented organized criminal gangs in Corleone… and to the next generation of the Mafia, who would bring their organization to America.

In April, I told the story of the 1837 cholera epidemic and, at its height, a foiled plot to blame the illness on Sicily’s foreign king. In Corleone, at least eight people—including three women—were murdered, before the killers were brought to justice, mainly through execution by military battalion on the town’s main plaza. One who was implicated, but not executed, was Antonino Milone. Unlike his younger brother, Leoluca, who was considered a ringleader of one of the murderous mobs, Antonino was merely imprisoned for his participation in the failed insurrection, according to Giovanni Colletto’s history of Corleone.

The Borgo Piano is a broad open area to the northeast of the oldest part of the town. On Google Maps, the long, lopsided diamond of the Borgo Piano is still visible between SP80 and the Corso dei Mille. Where it comes to a southerly point is the piazza. It is now called the Piazza Falcone and Borsellino, after the assassinated magistrates who ruled against the Mafia.

A couple of years before the cholera epidemic, police had been dispatched from Palermo to eliminate Rapanzino and his band of cattle rustlers. Just two years after his associates were hunted down and killed, Nicolo’ “Puntillo” Ciravolo saw his nephew, Antonino Ciravolo, brought to justice on the Borgo. Antonino Ciravolo, along with Leoluca Milone and at least three others, were executed on the second of August, 1837, on the Borgo Piano in Corleone.

At the time of their arrest, Antonino Milone, Leoluca’s brother, was about 29 years old. He was married to Anna Gioachina Castro, a sister of Rapanzino, and they had one child, a girl. Eight months later, his second daughter was born. In the 1840 census, Anna Gioachina appears in a household in the Porto Salvo district with her teenage sister and two young daughters, on the same street where the Castro children grew up. Antonino’s younger daughter died a couple years later. The older girl married into the Moscato family, whose associations with Giuseppe Morello’s counterfeiting operation merit a future post in this blog.

It’s not yet known in what year Antonino returned to Corleone. No more of his children have been found so far. But his death record appears in the Corleone records, indicating that he returned to his hometown before his death in 1872, at age 70. His wife died in 1887.