Bernardino Verro
| Bernardino Verro | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
3 July 1866 Corleone, Italy |
| Died | 3 November 1915 (aged 49) Corleone, Italy |
| Nationality | Italian |
| Occupation | Syndicalist and politician |
| Known for | Socialist leader of the Fasci Siciliani Mayor of Corleone Murdered by the Sicilian Mafia |
Bernardino Verro (Corleone, July 3, 1866 – Corleone, November 3, 1915) was a Sicilian syndicalist and politician. He was involved in the Fasci Siciliani (Sicilian Leagues) a popular movement of democratic and socialist inspiration in 1891-1894, and became the first socialist mayor of Corleone in 1914. He was killed by the Mafia.
Verro was involved in the foundation of the Fascio dei lavoratori of Corleone on September 8, 1892. At the age of 26, Verro became its president. "Our Fascio has about six thousand members," he told the journalist Adolfo Rossi, in an interview for La Tribuna from Rome in the autumn of 1893. "Our women have understood the advantages of union among the poor, and now teach their children socialism." Verro’s influence was not limited to Corleone. He was involved in setting up Fasci in neighbouring towns and mediated conflicts. Travelling by mule, he spread the message also in nearby towns.
At the Congress of the Fasci in Palermo on May 21–22, 1893, Verro was elected a member of the new Central Committee. In July 1893, he hosted a conference at Corleone that drafted model agrarian contracts for labourers, sharecroppers and tenants and presented them to the landowners. When those refused to negotiate a strike against landowners and against state taxes broke out over a large part of western Sicily. The so-called Patti di Corleone, are considered by historians to be the first trade union collective contract in capitalist Italy.
In the summer of 1893, Corleone became the strategic center of the peasant movement and the epicenter of the strike wave, thanks to Verro’s charisma and to his hard-nosed choices, including a strategic alliance with a Mafia clan in Corleone and alliances with prominent Mafiosi in outlying towns, most notably Vito Cascioferro and Nunzio Giaimo in Bisacquino. The Mafiosi were sometimes needed to enforce flying pickets with credible threats of violence and to make the strike costly to landowners by destroying their property.
In order to give the strike teeth and to protect himself from harm, Verro became a member of a Mafia group in Corleone, the Fratuzzi (the Brothers). In a memoir written many years later, he described the initiation ritual he underwent in the spring of 1893: "[I] was invited to take part in a secret meeting of the Fratuzzi. I entered a mysterious room where there were many men armed with guns sitting around a table. In the center of the table there was a skull drawn on a piece of paper and a knife. In order to be admitted to the Fratuzzi, [I] had to undergo an initiation consisting of some trials of loyalty and the pricking of the lower lip with the tip of the knife: the blood from the wound soaked the skull."
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