12 January is the feast day of Bernard of Corleone. He was beatified in 1768 and canonized in 2001.
Whether the fame of the town’s name is life following art is unclear.
It may be that Graham Greene had it in mind in 1938’s Brighton Rock, where the local mobster is Don Colleoni. Then there is The Godfather, published in 1969.
But and while the mafia had always had a heavy presence in Corleone, it was only in the 1980s and 1990s that a faction known as the Corleonesi rose to a bloody supremacy over the Palermo families. Although its power was later broken, as late as August 2016, the Guardian ran a story under the headline “Corleone local government dissolved due to mafia infiltration”, noting that the Sicilian town was “the latest of more than 200 Italian municipalities to be shut down for this reason since 1991”.
According to the Vatican’s website, the young Bernard was no mafioso but “was quick to draw his sword at the slightest provocation”; he became known as “the finest blade in Sicily” after severing the arm of his opponent in a duel.
In 2001, the English press reported the town’s hope that upon the canonization, St Bernard would become known as the patron saint of Mafia victims. He is, as well as patron saint of expectant mothers.
