Travels through Sicily and that part of Italy formerly called Magna Graecia

1773

de Beer Eb 1773 R

London: Printed for Edward and Charles Dilly

This travel memoir by Johann Hermann von Riedesel (born c. 1741), Baron of Eisenbach, Germany, consists of letters to his friend Johann Joachim Winckelmann. The Baron describes how, upon leaving Palermo on the 30th March 1767, he was accompanied by a guard to protect him from the banditti on the road. Were these banditti the predecessors of the Cosa Nostra or the Sicilian Mafia? John Dickie (2004) describes the Cosa Nostra as ‘an exclusive secret society’ governed by omertà or a code of silence and states that by 1890 ‘the mafia was already a murderous and sophisticated criminal association with powerful political connections and an international reach’.