My Brother, Salvatore Giuliano - Paperback

History gave him a legend. His own family gives him back his name.

For more than seventy years, the world has told one story about Salvatore Giuliano: the bandit of the Sicilian hills, the face on the wanted posters, the outlaw remade by courtrooms, newsreels, and a famous film. Now, for the first time in English, his own family sets down the truth.

Giuseppe Sciortino Giuliano is Salvatore's nephew. In My Brother, Salvatore Giuliano: The True Story, he brings to the page the firsthand testimony of his mother, Marianna Salvatore's sister who knew "Turiddu" when he was only a handsome, fearless, impossibly generous boy from a family of peaceful farmers in the hills above Montelepre, and who lived through everything that turned him into the most hunted man in Europe. It is the brother history rewrote as a monster, told at last from inside the family that raised him.

This is postwar Sicily as it truly was: a land of hunger, fear, and broken promises, where a celebrated "liberation" hardened into a new occupation, and where a few kilos of wheat could cost a man his freedom or his life. It was over wheat, and a single act of injustice, that a peaceful young farmer fired the shot that severed him from the ordinary world forever. From that moment there was no road back only the mountains, the manhunt, and the legend that would swallow him whole.

But the Giuliano his family knew was never the killer of the "official version." He was a fighter who took up arms for a starving and humiliated people; the young commander who dreamed of a free Sicily and rose to colonel in the separatist army, E.V.I.S.; the outlaw who pressed his own money into the hands of a weeping, barefoot old man and was blessed as "the father of the poor." And he was a poet, a romantic whose tenderness still breathes in the verses he left behind the dreams of love that perished, as he wrote, at the very height of their joy.

The family does not look away from the darkness. This account remembers the torture of their own by men sworn to uphold the law. It reveals the betrayals and the powerful figures who buried their crimes beneath Giuliano's name, and the forces that turned the massacre at Portella delle Ginestre into a weapon aimed at his heart. And it tells what the family believes truly happened on the night the world was told Salvatore Giuliano was dead a death, they insist, that was never what it appeared to be.

Across these pages a whole world comes alive: the Allied landing that promised freedom and delivered hunger; the secret war for Sicilian independence; the seven years one man slipped through the hands of an entire state; and the web of politicians, Mafia bosses, and foreign agents his survival threatened. This is history written not from an archive, but from the kitchen, the prison cell, and the mountain - by the people who were there.

Written in 1987 and built from the direct testimony of those who lived it, this is not another myth assembled by strangers. It is the Giuliano family's own act of love and defiance the story told by the blood that paid for every page of it.

For readers of true crime, modern Italian history, and the real events behind Mario Puzo's The Sicilian, My Brother, Salvatore Giuliano restores the man beneath the myth: not a blazing sun reduced to a pale and pitiful moon, but a Sicilian who would not kneel.

Some legends were created to bury a man. This one was written to bring him home.