House of Memories Felicia and Peppino Impastato

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A story of courage, resistance and love…

The house of Peppino Impastato, a young man killed by the Mafia in the ‘70s in Cinisi (Palermo), is the symbolic place where his mother, Felicia, has been living  after her son’s murder.

A house-museum to remember the distress  and commitment in  fighting mafia, from a family, that, for many years, had been compelled  by the organized crime.

Marrying Luigi Impastato, Felicia marks her entrance in a Mafia family. Her sad fate,  after the tragic loss of her son, will make her rebel against the code of silence, by opening, phisically and simbolically, the doors of this house to tell her story and the one of her son, killed by the Mafia.

In this House-Museum Felicia displayed all the things belonged to Peppino and his fighting for legality and justice.

 

The path to obtain justice for her son has been long and exhausting

Felicia turned out into a woman,  even in her disarming simplicity, firm and stubborn, that, although the initial isolation, overcoming fatigue, prejudice and fear, has never accepted the idea that Peppino’s death could have been considered  as a suicide or  a terrorist murder, as his killers let people believe in.

She was abandoned from some government representatives, a great mistake, that, more like a stain, has been washed out by some judges honest and intransigent  commitment who put themselves on the line and lost their life.

On December 7 2000, the Parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission, on the front door of her House of Memories , gave Felicia a report stating the responsibilities of some high representatives police officers, accused of misdirection in the investigation .

Felicia, died on December 7 2004, has courageously completed the task of her life and she has left us, with her  House of Memories,  destination of many visitors, a symbolic place, that, the president of the Impastato Center, Umberto Santino calls  a “Lay Altar”

A place where memory and disclosure of truth and culture, become, through it,  an alive symbol of the resistance against power and Mafia, a practical evidence of a struggle and courage experience, where the difference doesn’t lie in the family where you were born, but in the choices you make.

Even today, standing between the silence of  those walls, it seems to hear the excited voices of the endless quarrels between father and son, in front of a woman who helplessly suffered of dynamics of a peaceless family.

Learn more about the House of Memories: casamemoria.it

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