Theresa Maggio

I am subscribed to the Dinolfo Brothers feed. They are amazing video makers. They work out of Gangi, and I believe it is old Gangi in this wedding clip but I could be wrong. What a town. What talent these guys have. Talent, humor, appreciation of beauty. Dang! Are there USA photographers who make wedding movies like this?  Read More 

From The Guardian:

A mafia boss has been gunned down while riding his bicycle in Sicily, in what appeared to have been the sort of mob killing that has become rarer in recent years as dangerous figures have been locked up.

Giuseppe Dainotti, 67, was shot in the head as he cycled along a street in Palermo, almost 25 years to the day since anti-Mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone was killed in a bomb blast on a motorway on the Italian island.

Photographs of Monday’s crime scene evoked decades of violence in the Sicilian capital, showing Dainotti’s body covered by a sheet, only his shoes on show, and the white bicycle he was riding lying where it fell. Read More 

The boat docked shortly after 7:30 this morning at the port of Trapani, Sicily. The Italian Coast Guard ship "Diciotti" carried 512 immigrants rescued in the last few days on the Mediterranean Sea. Also aboard were seven cadavers of people who had drowned before rescuers could reach them.

Rescuers have been accused by some Sicilian authorities of taking money from traffickers to fund their efforts. Here is part of the response from MOAS:
"When questioned about why all our disembarkations are carried out in Italy, and not say, Malta or Tunisia, our representatives explained that MOAS is not the decision-maker in this  Read More 

United Nations officials said on Tuesday that 245 migrants were feared dead in two shipwrecks in the Mediterranean Sea. The death toll represents a major increase to an already grim tally this year.

More than 1,300 people are now estimated to have died while trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe in 2017, most while attempting to  Read More 

From La Repubblica 8 May 2017:

Luigi Duro, a 44-year-old security guard who was laid off from his job, decided to protect the splendid white, flowing "Fountain of Shame" in Piazza Pretoria as an act of civil service and to keep his feeling of having a purpose in life. He started his vigil yesterday morning.
He made himself a little badge with his name on it so he can look more authoritative, he said. "I decided to spend my time working for the common good," he said. " I decided to put my twenty-some years of experience in security to some good, without making any profit from it." Read More 

From La Repubblica 6 May 2017
CATANIA, Sicily -- The rescue ship Phoenix belonging to the non-governmental organization MOAS docked at this port this morning bearing 394 rescued migrants and one dead 10-year-old boy who was allegedly murdered by his trafficker. MOAS co-founder Regina Catrambone, who was also aboard, said the boy was pistol- whipped to death by a trafficker when the boy refused to give the trafficker his baseball cap. NGOs rescuing migrants at sea have been accused by certain Catania officials of accepting money from traffickers to pick up shipwrecked migrants and plague Europe with them. Catambrone and the other NGOs say they run their operations with donations from supporters. Read More 

From La Repubblica Palermo online, 5 May 2019:
CATANIA -- The Doctors Without Borders research and rescue ship Prudence docked at Catania at 7 this morning with the bodies of six dead immigrants who had drowned in the Mediterranean. Five women and one man who had left Libya aboard improvised small boats along with hundreds of people fleeing famine and poverty in Africa. For the volunteers of Doctors Without Borders it was difficult to identify them: the six had been dead in the water for days before being picked up by volunteers. Read More 

A minute and a half with Rick Steves in Palermo's markets.

Doctors Without Borders in the Mediteranean operates from a NGO shp Aquarius to save migrants standed and in danger of drowning at sea . Today they resued 187 migrants.

When he saw boats in the distance, Issa knew he was going to live. It was July 2014 and he had spent hours in the sea, clinging to a plastic petrol container while women, men and children drowned around him. The small rubber boat that was supposed to take them all to Italy had sunk just two hours after leaving the Libyan coast. Of the 137 people Issa says were on board, only 49 survived.

Issa, from Burkina Faso, was not rescued by any passing ship but was picked up by the Libyan coastguard. Rather than being taken to a safe port in Italy as he had hoped, he was returned to Libya where he was handed over to the police. He says he was locked up for months in appalling conditions and beaten regularly by policemen who demanded money in exchange for his release.

“My hands were tied behind my back,” he said. “I was laying on the floor facing down, and they were beating me on the back with a belt and electric cables.”

Only after Issa’s family scraped together 625 OOO CFA (about £900), was he finally released.

In September last year, he tried to reach Italy again but after three days at sea, the boat he was on landed back on Libyan shores. “We were arrested upon arrival and taken to a prison in Tripoli, and two weeks later we were transferred to the city of Sabha. We learnt that we had been sold to traffickers.” After a month in captivity, he and others managed to escape. “Our abductors shot some people. I don’t know whether any of them died,” he said. Read More