Author(s): Frank Viviano

Travel

Lu sangu lava lu sangu, 'Blood Washes Blood'. Sicilian proverb, alluding to the torrent of unforgiving vengeance that flows from an unforgivable offence. More than a century ago, Frank Viviano's namesake was murdered at a lonely crossroads in Sicily. He had been a revolutionary and a thief, a Robin-Hood bandit who traveled by night in the robes of a friar. Sicilians called him 'the Monk'. Shortly before his death in 1993, Viviano's grandfather whispered the name of the murderer - and nothing more. The whisper sent him to the fishing village of Terrasini west of Palermo in search of the Monk and his killer; in pursuit of a mystery that left his namesake dead on a country lane, drove his family to America and set in motion an eighty-year conspiracy of silence. From his first day in Sicily, Viviano was confronted by ever more baffling clues and coincidences, an impenetrable code of discretion and a maze of bureaucratic dead-ends all linked with the island's tortured history and the continuing blood feuds of organized crime. Somewhere in the parallel Sicily that no stranger will ever know was locked the answer to the riddle of his namesake's killing. The revelation, when it came, was to change Viviano's entire understanding of his family's past and the violent contradictions of his own life. Blood Washes Blood is part detective story, part touching personal memoir where past and present meet in a spellbinding mix. Variety has described the book as 'an Italian Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil'. Paperback