The Mafia

What makes Tony Soprano so likeable? Why would we rather leave the cannoli and take the gun? Do we truly want Scarfaces Tony Montana to succeed? Is Michael Corleone a misunderstood hero or a despicable villain? Roberto Dainotto traces the complex and fascinating development of the maa: its rural beginnings in Western Sicily; its growth into what has been aptly described as a global multinational of crime; and its parallel evolution in music, print and on the big screen. The book probes the tension between the real maa - its brutal and often violent reality - and how we imagine it to be: a mythical assembly of codes of honour, family values and chivalric masochism. Rather than dismissing such maa stereotypes as untrue, Dainotto sets out to understand what needs and desires, material and psychic longings, are satised by our maa fantasies
.Exploring the rich array of lms, books, television, music and even video games portraying and inspired by the maa, this book offers not only a social, economic and political history of the maa but a new way of understanding our enduring fascination with what lurks behind the sinister omertà of the family business.