The Beati Paoli
Sicily · The islands
Palermo, the Capo quarter: the cave beneath the Baldi house, between vicolo degli Orfani and via Beati Paoli
The Beati Paoli — the sect of hooded avengers that according to legend met in the undergrounds of the Capo, in Palermo: an eighteenth-century notice and a novel of 1909.
- Variants and dialect names
- Beati Paoli, Compagnia de’ Beati Paoli; in Villabianca also «vendicosi»
- What is told
- A secret sect of hooded avengers who would meet by night in the undergrounds of the Capo to try and punish the powerful whom ordinary justice does not touch. The only notice earlier than the novel is in the marquis of Villabianca, who in the second half of the eighteenth century recalls it as a thing of the past: a «sect of impious and capricious people», also called «vendicosi», active between 1698 and 1719, with the last member, Vito Vituzzo, «church steward» at San Matteo, and the house of the lawyer Giovan Battista Baldi «in which were laid the arms, both firearms and blades». The rest — the underground tribunals, the sentences, the hooded men — is written by literature: Vincenzo Linares in 1840 and, above all, Luigi Natoli, who under the pseudonym William Galt published I Beati Paoli in the «Giornale di Sicilia» in 239 instalments from 6 May 1909 to 2 January 1910.
- What it was forthe author’s reading
- A myth of alternative justice, born where official justice was perceived as the lords’: Villabianca says so explicitly, «the middling and low people, being unable to bear the expense of keeping hired assassins, made it their boast to proceed impiously by themselves with their own hands». Natoli’s novel turns it into a popular epic, and from there the mafia has adopted it as a founding myth — which is the most consistent modern use of the legend.
- Where it is attested
- Francesco Maria Emanuele e Gaetani, marquis of Villabianca, Opuscoli palermitani, manuscript, Biblioteca Comunale di Palermo (cited at second hand: M. Polidoro, «Query» no. 22 and CICAP, 2015). Vincenzo Linares, «I Beati Paoli», in Racconti popolari, vol. I, Palermo, 1840. Luigi Natoli (William Galt), I Beati Paoli, «Giornale di Sicilia», 1909-1910; in book form Palermo, La Gutenberg, 1912; Flaccovio edition 1971 with an introduction by Umberto Eco and a historical note by Rosario La Duca. Studies: Francesco Renda, I Beati Paoli. Storia, letteratura e leggenda, Palermo, Sellerio, 1988; F. P. Castiglione, Indagine sui Beati Paoli, Sellerio, 1987.
- Caution
- Grade C because, as a sect, the Beati Paoli rest on a single witness writing decades after the events and by hearsay, and on nothing from the archives. The link with the «Vendicosi» of 1185-86, repeated everywhere, is a construction of Villabianca himself; the medieval chronicle that would name them has not been verified. The «cave of the Beati Paoli» exists, beneath the Baldi house, and is already indicated by Villabianca; whether it is a sirocco chamber, a rubbish pit or part of an early Christian cemetery is said by popular sources that do not agree, and no archaeological publication has been found. Linares’s first appearance in «Il Vapore» in December 1836 is plausible but unconfirmed; Natoli’s book edition is dated now 1912, now 1921. Tommaso Buscetta’s sentence «we have the same oath» circulates without the record it would come from. «Blasco» is a character in the novel, not a historical member.
The grade says how well the entry is documented, not how interesting it is. How the grades are assigned.