The Beati Paoli, the secret sect of Palermo

In the stories told by Palermitans, beneath the alleys of the Capo and the old Papireto quarter, hooded men once moved about, meeting at night in secret caves to judge the powerful. These were the Beati Paoli, a sect that according to legend defended the weak against the abuses of nobles and clergy, carrying out death sentences against those who escaped official justice. History and invention are here almost inextricably intertwined, and this is precisely why the legend has enjoyed such success.

The earliest accounts

The most important source is the Marquis of Villabianca, Francesco Maria Emanuele e Gaetani, an eighteenth-century Palermo scholar who devoted a few pages of his writings to the sect. According to his account, the Beati Paoli were active in the Palermo of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, meeting in hidden places and leading by day an apparently ordinary, even devout life. The information, however, is fragmentary and is not confirmed by judicial records.

The origin of the name remains obscure, and several explanations have been proposed. Some scholars linked the sect to an old medieval society of «Vendicosi», or avengers, said to have operated in Sicily in the Norman period. Modern historians prefer to read the legend as the distorted memory of vendetta societies or self-defence groups that arose at a time when justice was deeply unequal and the powerful often went unpunished.

Luigi Natoli's novel

The fame of the Beati Paoli exploded at the beginning of the twentieth century thanks to Luigi Natoli, a Palermo writer and historian. Between 1909 and 1910 the «Giornale di Sicilia» published in instalments his novel «I Beati Paoli», signed with the pseudonym William Galt. Set in early eighteenth-century Palermo, the story follows the adventures of young Blasco da Castiglione and the mysterious Coriolano della Floresta, head of the sect, in a plot of revenge, usurped inheritances and underground passages.

The success was enormous. The novel became popular reading throughout Sicily, passed from hand to hand and read aloud in families, and it helped fix the image of the Beati Paoli as romantic avengers. It is still considered a classic of the Italian serial novel, reprinted many times and able to shape the way Palermitans imagine their own past.

The places of the legend

In Palermo there is a Piazza Beati Paoli, in the Capo district, and tradition points to the entrances of the caves where the sect is said to have met nearby. The city's subsoil, crossed by channels of Arab origin called qanat, by crypts and cavities, did indeed offer an ideal setting for the legend. Some of these underground routes have been explored and partly opened to visitors, allowing people to experience the hidden world beneath the streets.

It remains a delicate subject, because the myth of the secret avengers has sometimes been improperly invoked to ennoble criminal organisations. Historians urge a clear distinction: the Beati Paoli belong above all to literature and the imagination, a mirror of the longing for justice of a people who for centuries felt excluded from official justice and entrusted to legend their hopes of redemption.