She has no public face but she has two identities. And currently she is also a Member of the Parliament for the Five Stars Movement, the party that favors faceless politicians, congressmen and congresswomen who are just spokespersons and first ministers who are mere executors.
Piera Aiello spoke exclusively to L'Espresso magazine telling a story that with all its contradictions is an exceptional one in an exceptional country. The intersection between the two features makes her case exceptional as well, and also a symbol of today’s Italy, as it combines the Mafia and politics in an identity blender worthy of a Pirandello novel.

Piera Aiello, 51, spoke and got active against the Mafia thus becoming what the Italian legal system names a “witness of justice”, de facto a person who lives permanently under police protection and in strict anonymity. She was 23, and already the widow of the son of a Mafia boss that she had been forced to marry, when she decided to tell everything she knew to Paolo Borsellino, the highly respected prosecutor later killed by a Mafia car bomb that also claimed the life of other five policemen.

Her stories helped condemn a number of Mafia members in Trapani, but she paid a very high toll: she had to leave Sicily alone with her three-year-old girl, and live since like a ghost – with another identity, under permanent security forces protection and in protected locations. Now, after almost thirty years during which she forged herself a new life, she has just been elected to the House for the Five Star Movement with a landslide vote — 78.000 preferences in the single-candidate district of Marsala. In order to be able to register as a candidate, she said, she had to hide her intentions from the ministry of Internal Affairs: "I had to ‘dribble’ its Central Commission, otherwise they would have prevented me from running."

Although she is now in public office, she would prefere to keep her face unknown to the public. That is, however, almost impossible, and deep down she knows that: "It's like giving birth, like when a child is about to be born but doesn’t want to. On the floor of the House I will not speak to the microphone in person: I will have my words read by others. But not out of fear: this is because I believe what counts are my ideas, not my face," she said. All while continuing to escape photographers and cameras, Aiello agreed to speak about her new life, her third life, to L’Espresso magazine. In her story she included all its contradictions: how she revealed her "true" identity to her children, how she has no way to define her civil status ("Piera Aiello is widowed, but I am married," she explained to the administrative staff of the Chamber of Deputies), how she cunningly became a member of the Parliament with her old identity.

Will she ever be able to join her identities? "Neither one will disappear. I will die with two names."


©L'Espresso