The Story of Placido Rizzotto

Origins

Corleone and the Sicilian latifondo

He was born on January 2, 1914 in Corleone, the eldest of seven children. His mother, Giovanna Moschitta, died while he was still a boy. His father, Carmelo, was arrested by the Fascist regime on charges of Mafia association — one of those trials where the real offence was being poor in a town where the Mafia wrote the rules and the prefecture signed them. Placido left school and went to work the land to support his brothers and sisters.

In those fields he learned what a latifondo was: a system where a farmworker is born and dies without ever seeing a harvest that is his own. The gabelloti — middlemen in the service of absentee landlords — decided who worked, what they earned, whether they ate. Behind the gabelloti, the Mafia. Behind the Mafia, the silence of everyone else. Rizzotto grew up inside that silence and decided, as a man, to break it.

Personal details	Information
Place and date of birth	Corleone, January 2, 1914
Family	Eldest of seven children
Parents	Carmelo Rizzotto and Giovanna Moschitta
Education	Left school early for economic reasons
Political background	Socialism — Partisan — CGIL leader

1943–1945

The Resistance as a school of democracy

Rizzotto's path took a decisive turn when he was conscripted into the Italian Army during the Second World War. He served in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, in the Carnic Alps, where he rose to the rank of sergeant.

After the armistice of September 8, 1943, he refused to surrender or collaborate with Nazi-Fascist forces, choosing instead to join the Garibaldi Brigades and subsequently the "Napoli" Band, led by the socialist Pietro Agostinucci.

His participation in the partisan struggle was not merely a military choice but an intense political education. The experience of the Resistance gave Rizzotto the organisational and ideological models he would later seek to transplant into the feudal reality of Sicily.

The conviction that change was possible through collective action and the defence of democratic legality became the core of his future trade union work.

1945–1948

Return to Sicily and trade union activism

At the end of the war, Rizzotto returned to his homeland driven by a "new wind": a hope for social redemption for peasants who had lived in near-slavery for centuries. His rise in the labour movement was swift: he became president of the ANPI veterans' association in Palermo and, in October 1947, was elected Secretary of the Corleone Chamber of Labour.

His mission was clear: to enforce the Gullo Decrees, issued in 1944 by Agriculture Minister Fausto Gullo, which provided for the granting of uncultivated or poorly farmed latifondo lands to peasant cooperatives, and a fairer share of produce (60% to the worker, 40% to the landowner).

In Sicily, however, these decrees were systematically sabotaged by the alliance between latifondo power and the local Mafia, which saw control of the land as the foundation of its economic and social dominance.

The challenge to Navarra

Rizzotto did not limit himself to propaganda: he actively organised the occupation of feudal estates such as Strasatto, directly challenging Cosa Nostra's grip on the territory. This put him on a collision course with Michele Navarra, the local physician and undisputed Mafia boss of Corleone, who ruled the area through a combination of paternalism and brute violence.

Navarra recognised in Rizzotto an existential threat to his system of power. The trade unionist was dismantling, one estate at a time, the economic and social architecture on which the Corleone Mafia had rested for generations.

Leoluchina Sorisi

Alongside Placido, on those marches towards occupied estates, walked — and ran, as revolutionaries run — his fiancée Leoluchina Sorisi. Tall, dark-haired, striking: she fought beside him, struggled beside him, occupied the land alongside the peasants. It was she who identified Placido's remains when the carabinieri and cave divers brought them up from the sinkhole at Rocca Busambra, recognising a chain still around the neck of what was left. History would later have Luciano Liggio — the presumed triggerman — captured in Leoluchina's home, where he had sought shelter. One of the many shattering contradictions of this Sicilian story. (This detail is reported in several journalistic and cinematic accounts but is not unanimously confirmed by historical sources.)