Behind a strong mafia town in Italy are strong women
COLUMN ONE
Many women in San Luca are mothers, wives and even accomplices of mobsters, but some are standing up to the powerful 'Ndrangheta and calling for peace.
SAN LUCA, ITALY — The hardened women of San Luca want you to know a thing or two about their notorious town. Not everyone belongs to the mob, they will tell you. And many who do are driven to it by poverty and neglect.
It's a tough sell, no doubt. San Luca, a remote hilltop town in southern Italy, is the ancestral home and principal headquarters of a criminal organization that has emerged as the country's most powerful and dangerous mafia, the 'Ndrangheta.
The women here have always had a complex role in the dynamics of an insular society that seems to exist at the margins of mainstream Italy. They are the mothers of the mobsters, their wives and, prosecutors say, often their accomplices. Fiercely protective of their brood, they can be as ruthless as their men. In the last year, it also appears that some San Luca women have served as a counterforce to the violence spiraling from internal feuds.
The Times recently was given a rare glimpse of the life of a San Luca family and the strong women who run it. Saveria Giorgi and her adult daughter, Teresa Giampaolo, insist that they are not part of the 'Ndrangheta (pronounced en-DRAHN-geh-tah), and their small home does not reflect any of the drug wealth typical of the hard-core mafiosi. Furniture is sparse and worn; there are no fancy appliances.
Yet, San Luca is a town of interconnected clans, and there is no one who cannot claim a mobster among his or her relatives. In virtually every family, someone has been imprisoned or killed.
"Journalists always speak badly of San Luca," Giorgi, a stocky, weathered woman in her 60s, told two visitors over a lunch of soft pasta and dried basil picked from the family's fields.
"Anything that happens, the blame ends up here," complained her daughter, Giampaolo.
San Luca, a town of about 4,500 people, is a jumbled collection of houses in various stages of construction scattered over several hills. It is surrounded by olive groves, cactus, pines and a trash dump. The main local job is a kind of minimum-wage forest ranger; that means real employment is elsewhere.
The women raise many children, plant and harvest the crops and guard their homes while the men are often away. Giorgi's husband, now retired, worked for years in factories in Germany; Giampaolo's husband drives a truck on long sojourns all over Italy.
