Listen to what I tell you, son. Even if the Italian state wins the battle, it does not mean the idea was wrong. I am old now — but if I were born again, I would fight again for the independence of Sicily.

Marianna Giuliano sister of Salvatore Giuliano, speaking to her son

My Brother,
Salvatore Giuliano

The True Story

For seventy-five years, Salvatore Giuliano has been explained by people who never met him — reporters who arrived after the shooting, novelists who borrowed the name, filmmakers who needed a bandit. Every version was assembled from court records, second-hand testimony, and the accounts of men with reasons to lie.

This one was told by his sister.

Marianna Giuliano grew up in the same house. She knew him before the mountains, before the headlines, before the myth. What she remembered she told her son, and he wrote it down.

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Why this account is not like the others

A source, not a reconstruction

Marianna Giuliano was not a witness to history. She was family. What is set down here came from inside the house, not from an archive.

The politics the story usually loses

Giuliano's name travels attached to banditry. His family's account is about something else — a separatist movement, a young man inside it, and what the postwar Italian state did in reply.

Written in Sicily

Not researched from a distance. Set down in the place the events happened, by the people they happened to.

Read the opening chapter first

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Also by Giuseppe Sciortino Giuliano

Two further volumes, written from the same place and the same family archive.

Don't Let the Sicilians Know

Two thousand years of Sicily, told from inside the family. From the Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Normans to the unification of 1860, the peasant revolts, and an autonomy the author argues never truly arrived. Drawn from Marianna Giuliano's testimony and documents kept in the house.

"If Sicilian blood runs in your veins; if you feel neither European nor North African — in reading this book you will find the identity you have sought in vain."

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Life in Hell: Causes and Effects

Sicily between 1943 and 1950 — occupation, hunger, and the choices ordinary people were forced to make. Built from decades of conversations with eyewitnesses, survivors and former members of the independence movement, alongside documents and family memory. The mothers, the fathers, the disappeared: the part of the story the official record leaves out.