Rome exhibition gives brutal insight into Mafia murders

Rome - A photo exhibition in Rome has shocked visitors with its brutal records of Mafia killings, blowing away the romanticised and sanitised image of Cosa Nostra.

The pictures were taken in the Sicilian capital Palermo from the start of the 1980s by a team of photographers working for the photo department of a local daily newspaper.

"There were four or five of us," said Letizia Battaglia, now 71.

"We were tuned into police radio frequencies and we spent our days waiting for 'it' to happen.

"Then we raced off on our Vespas to be first on the scene," said Battaglia, an anti-Mafia campaigner who became a local politician in Palermo and then a regional Sicilian assembly member,

Some of her pictures from those days are included in the Rome exhibition, which ends on May 14, with others taken by her former companion Franco Zecchin.

"You could have five murders in the same day," said Battaglia.

"The work was exhausting but you couldn't stand by with your arms folded, with our little Mafia on our little island.

"We had to bear witness to this violence and the world had to know."