A month after the arrest of Mafia king Bernardo Provenzano, Italy is gripped by an intense fascination for anything connected to the shadowy figure who ran the Sicilian Mob for 43 years.
Families have their photos taken in front of the farmhouse where he was arrested, software experts pore over his encoded messages and office workers debate who will now take supreme power in Cosa Nostra.
The media, fed with regular titbits by investigators in Palermo, is maintaining its interest in Provenzano. A rash of internet websites has popped up devoted to him and book shops are well stocked with new studies and biographies. In Corleone, Provenzano's home town, young entrepreneurs are thinking about buying up the house where the feared mafia chieftain was finally apprehended and turning it into a country guesthouse.
"It would attract lots of tourists," said one, suggesting that the best approach would be to leave all the rooms exactly as they were when the police arrived at dawn on April 11.
It would be more of an 'experience' for visitors if they could see the piles of cashmere sweaters that Provenzano accumulated and the typewriters with which he hammered out his henchmen's instructions. Distrustful of phones, Provenzano favoured letter writing as a way of communicating with mobsters all over Sicily. He wrote them on an old typewriter, then folded up
them up tightly, giving them to his personal 'postmen' to deliver by hand.
Because of the picturesque contrast they offer to mobile phones and email, these 'pizzini' have struck a chord with many Italians and frequently feature in the routines of television comedians. Now, in banks and offices where people used to send out 'memos' and 'reports', employees playfully promise each other that a 'pizzino' is on the way.
Provenzano's correspondence, containing eye-opening insights into the running of the criminal underworld, has been the subject of intense study by investigators. But plenty of amateurs have been having a look as well, intrigued by the Mafia boss's use of secret codes to refer to key people in the Cosa Nostra hierarchy and his support organisation.
A group of Treviso-based experts in internet and software security have been applying their minds to the numeric codes that Provenzano used to be fond of. They discovered that when he talks in one letter about "512151522 191212154" he is referring to "Binnu Riina", the nickname of Bernardo Riina, one of his henchmen.
The code, explained Alessandro Martignano, is a classic 'Caesar cipher' system, in which a series of sequential numbers takes the place of the letters of the alphabet. The simplest system expresses A as 1, B as 2 and so on. Provenzano made it harder by having A as 4, B as 5 and continuing from there. Hence, "5-12-15-15-22" spells out "Binnu", the Sicilian abbreviation for Bernardo.
But it seems he realised that this system was too easy to break and in his later 'pizzini' he uses number codes which have no apparent logic. The recipients knew who he was referring to.
So, for example, his still unidentified chauffeur was '5', his equally mysterious doctor was '60' and his nephew, who acted as secretary, was 123. The people of Corleone, most of whom are tired of being associated with the Mafia and its leader, are less inclined to absorb themselves in the minutiae of Provenzano's life and style of administration.
But they don't want to remember the man so much as the day he was arrested. The town council has approved a measure to rename the road which goes past his last residence. It is to be called Via 11 aprile.
"It seemed impossible that he would ever be arrested," said mayor Nicolo Nicolosi. "We want to leave a sign for future generations that nothing is impossible. With the right culture and commitment, this city can really say goodbye to the Mafia".
