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Mafia Word Origins

"The word Mafia became known throughout Italy for the first time in 1863, when a Sicilian writer, Giuseppe Rizzotto [sic--according to Hess, Rizzotti e Mosca, 2], wrote a play entitled "I Mafiusi di La Vicaria" which went through 2,000 performances, over a period of 23 years, of which 34 in the Italian language, in Rome alone, in 1884.

"According to Gaetano Mosca, the word mafia cannot be found in any Sicilian dictionary before 1868, when it was entered as a neologism in Traina's "Sicilian-Italian Dictionary."In another dictionary, Mortillaro's, published in 1878, the word is said to be of Piedmontese origin and to be synonymous with camorra. However, this is not correct.

"The adjective mafiusu (mafioso, in Italian) has been common in Sicily for at least two hundred yers. Cesareo, the poet, found the following verses in an eighteenth century manuscript:

Quannu vinisti vui, piciotta bedda
tutta la briaria si ribiddau
chista è la donna chiù mafiusiedda
chi l'anncilu, bedd' ancilu purtau.

(when you came, beautiful girl
the entire prison revolted
she is the finest-looking woman
that the angel, the beautiful angel, brought down).

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