Can a Gay, Catholic, Leftist Actually Squelch Corruption in Sicily?

Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum for The New York Times

Rosario Crocetta, flanked by bodyguards, in Sicily. He has received death threats from organized crime, dating from his time as mayor of a small city.

Rosario Crocetta smokes two to three packs of cigarettes a day, lighting them without putting them to his lips, often glancing at the three cellphones arrayed before him as he does so. If you are speaking to him, as an emissary from Turin named Antonio Saitta was on the day I first met Crocetta, he often picks up one of the phones in midconversation, without apology, and urgently begins reading text messages.

It was spring, and we sat in Crocetta's office in the Palazzo dei Normanni, built by the first Norman king of Sicily in the 12th century and later home to a ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, Spanish viceroys and a Bourbon king. Since 1947, it has been the seat of the Regional Assembly, the governing body of Sicily, whose current president is Crocetta, a 62-year-old gay Catholic leftist with a penchant for romanticism and poetry, who is unlike any president the region has ever seen.

Normally in Italy, it is the politicians from the impoverished south who go north with hat in hand, but Saitta had flown to Palermo to try to convince Crocetta to abandon his plan to abolish Sicily's provincial governments — a layer of bureaucracy in Italy that exists between the regional and municipal levels, which Crocetta was arguing was a source of waste and mismanagement. As president of the Union of Italian Provinces, Saitta was of course invested in the preservation of Sicily's nine provinces, and he was working hard to keep Crocetta's attention and convince him that the new model he was proposing could not work. After several minutes, Crocetta tired of following the man's argument. The real problem, he wanted Saitta to understand, was of an entirely different nature. "There is a revolution at our gates," Crocetta said, "and if we don't change everything — really change — the people will invade the government buildings. They'll come in here to toss us out the window. And you know what?" — he paused and looked at each of the people in the room. "I'll throw myself out along with them, because they're right."

In the eight days I spent with Crocetta, not one passed without some group protesting outside the Palazzo dei Normanni or the nearby Palazzo d'Orleans, where the presidential offices are. Some of the protesters were maintenance workers (many of them former convicts), who work for the city of Palermo, which no longer has the money to pay them. Then there were representatives of Sicily's 26,000 forest rangers, also now a target of the president's cuts, and large groups of workers from Sicily's trade schools, which employ about 8,000 people in the region, nearly half of all trade-school employees in the entire country. Many of these schools are created only to get a piece of the public payroll, and Crocetta had made clear that their days were numbered.

By this point, the police knew the protesters by name. They shared smokes in the quiet moments, then when tensions rose, out came the riot gear. On my third day in Palermo, some of the ex-cons-turned-maintenance-workers took over a conference room in the Palazzo d'Orleans, saying they wouldn't leave until the government provided them some relief.

Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum for The New York Times

Crocetta mobbed by protesters and members of the media in Syracuse.

The financial crisis has been especially brutal in Sicily — which has been referred to as the "Greece of Italy" — a place where the debt has spiraled so far out of control that many fear it will bring the rest of Italy down with it. Even by Italian standards, Sicily has long been extreme in its waste and corruption. The government spent lavishly on companies and projects that had little or no purpose other than to guarantee votes and keep political parties in power. Directly or indirectly, the regional government that Crocetta oversees employs about 50,000 people, whose salaries total more than a billion euros a year. Past presidents were able to avoid the day of reckoning, but now the money has all but dried up. And according to a study by the European Commission, among 262 European regions examined, Sicily is 235th in terms of competitiveness.

Marco De Martino is a longtime U.S. correspondent for Italian magazines and currently writes for Vanity Fair Italy. This is his first article for the magazine.