The resurrection of Palermo: how the mafia battlefield became a cultural capital

The Sicilian capital is using millions of euros seized from crime bosses to fund regeneration - though the scars inflicted by the Cosa Nostra may never fully heal

Every city, at some stage in its history, reaches a tipping point. For Palermo, it was one sweltering afternoon in July 1992, when more than 1,500 soldiers armed with automatic weapons took up positions on every corner of its eerily quiet streets in a show of military force unknown to Italy since the end of the second world war.

On that day, 24 July, the war was against the mafia, and Italy was losing. Six days earlier, a car bomb had killed Paolo Borsellino, the chief justice investigating the godfathers of Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian mafia. The five officers in his police escort also died. In May, the car of another judge, Giovanni Falcone, the mafia bosses' number one enemy, had been blown up. The 300 kilos of TNT that killed him along with his wife and three escorting officers opened up a 15-metre crater in the motorway connecting the airport to the city.