The Baroness had been penned into a heavily-guarded waiting room and was now too shocked

The Baroness had been penned into a heavily-guarded waiting room and was now too shocked to talk. Nobody, it turned out, had been seriously hurt.Eventually we meet the following evening, at her home in Angelica’s flat in Reggio Calabria, in a middle-rise building near the sea. In endearingly aristocratic fashion, she apologises for appearing in a simple sweater, slacks and slippers, explaining that she is still shaken from the previous day’s accident. The Baroness is nevertheless an elegant woman, her smooth, moon-shaped face framed by a thick sweep of greying hair. Her poise compensates for any signs of strain; she even manages an occasional smile. All around us, the elegant furniture bears the heraldic symbol of the Cordopatri family, a sun and three stars in the top half, a mountain range and a large heart in the bottom. (The name Cordopatri means, literally, “I give my heart to my country.”) Five cats play happily as we talk.The Baroness, though not strident, is forthright.

“The Mafia are no better than sewer rats, strong only when they are drugged up and carry a pistol in their hand,” she says “They only win because people are afraid of them. My conviction is that the Mafia is not strong at all.”These are fighting words from a woman whose story speaks volumes about the vice-like grip in which the Calabrian Mafia, known locally as the ‘ndrangheta (“honoured society”), holds the social and economic life of the region. Calabria has a higher concentration of Mafia activity than anywhere in Italy, more so even than Sicily, and Reggio Calabria is its most insidious corner. The influence of organised crime hangs like a pall over every aspect of day-to-day life. As a Calabrian, you have to be careful not to step into the wrong bar for your wake-up cup of cappuccino, or park your car in the wrong spot; traffic wardens, meanwhile, distribute parking tickets at their peril. “Calabria is the problem to beat all problems,” says Salvatore Boemi, the most prominent of Reggio’s anti-Mafia prosecutors. “We have to find a way to isolate the Mafia, otherwise we will never get rid of it.”IN MANY ways, Baroness Cordopatri’s battle with the Mammoliti clan epitomises the social forces which underly Italy’s ambivalent relationship with the Mafia.

It is a classic confrontation between the old aristocratic order and the new entrepreneurial criminal classes that have sprouted from the agrarian peasantry.The Cordopatris once owned nearly all of the plain of Gioia Tauro, the most fertile territory in Calabria, whose lush soil and warm, humid climate help produce some of the finest olives, lemons and oranges in Italy. In the 18th century, though, the estates began to be divided; Baroness Teresa’s line of the family ended up inheriting just 40 hectares, including the fateful 12-hectare olive grove.Despite the evident decline, the Baroness still talks enthusiastically about the noble blood of her lineage, starting with the Swabian princes who founded the dynasty in the sixth century. She notes how the Cordopatris first came to southern Italy with Charlemagne, establishing themselves as landowners several hundred years before the Savoys, the Piedmontese dynasty which provided Italy’s short-lived royal family “Our family felt only contempt for them. In fact, when my father said he wanted to join the diplomatic service in the early years of this century, my grandfather forbade him, saying no Cordopatri would ever be allowed to serve the House of Savoy.”The Cordopatris have always been refined, educated and well-connected. Teresa’s grandfather was friends with mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria, while her father entertained the post-war generation of government ministers, including the founding father of the republic, Alcide De Gasperi. When the Baroness was baptised in 1933 (as Teresa Maria Rosaria Carmen Rachele Cordopatri dei Capece), the guests were driven to church by liveried chauffeurs and the women were all offered perfumed lavender bottled for the occasion.The Mammolitis, by contrast, are of rough peasant stock.

Unlike the families of Cosa Nostra in Sicily, who have moved down into the cities from their mountain villages, the ‘ndrangheta clans have never allowed their new- found wealth to persuade them to leave the rural estates where their forefathers worked for generations.Calabria is Italy’s poorest area, a wild, rugged region in which starvation and disease, particularly malaria, have never entirely lost their foothold. The inward-looking, largely agricultural population has always resented the successive waves of invaders and aristocratic exploiters of their land. (‘Ndrangheta is an ancient Greek word, a linguistic throwback to the days when Calabria was part of colonial Magna Graecia.) Originally, the Mammolitis were exploited along with the rest. But when feudalism was abolished in southern Italy in the early 19th century, the landowners’ stranglehold was replaced by that of the network of estate managers that they had established These were the forerunners of the modern Mafia.

By the beginning of this century they had begun to stand up to their masters, with growing impunity. At first this ‘ndrangheta activity took the form of working-class solidarity, a kind of “poor man’s freemasonry”, as the eminent local journalist Aldo Varano puts it; it was only later that the clans also began intimidating the peasant classes from which they themselves stemmed. The Baroness recalls the intensity of class hostility that greeted her on her first trip to Castellace at the age of eight. The guardian at the gate of the family estate leaned over and whispered to her: “Landlords are like death, always coming even if you don’t expect them.”In the Fifties and Sixties, the most powerful ‘ndrangheta families, chiefly the Mammolitis and their rivals the Piromallis, launched into broad-scale expropriations of land and full-blown entrepreneurship, financing their operations by intercepting government development funds or by kidnapping the children of rich industrialists.