Giovanni Falcone - Early Life

Early Life

Falcone was born in 1939 to a middle-class family in the Via Castrofilippo near the seaport district La Kalsa, a neighborhood of central Palermo which suffered extensive destruction by aerial attacks during the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943. His father, Arturo Falcone, the director of a provincial chemical laboratory, was married to Luisa Bentivegna. Giovanni had two older sisters, Anna and Maria. Falcone's parents emphasised the importance of hard work, bravery and patriotism, he later said they 'expected the maximum' from him. At school Falcone would get into fights with larger children if he thought his friends were being picked on.

The Mafia was present in the area but quiescent; Tommaso Spadaro, a boy with whom he played ping-pong in the neighborhood Catholic Action recreation center, would later become a notorious Mafia smuggler and killer, but mafiosi were not a major presence in his childhood. As boys Falcone and Borsellino, who was born in the same neighbourhood, played soccer together on the Piazza Mangione. Both had classmates who ended up as mafiosi. Falcone grew up at a time when Sicilians did not acknowledge the existence of the Mafia as a coherent organised group, assertions to the contrary by other Italians were often seen as 'attacks from the north'.

After a classical education, Giovanni studied law at the University of Palermo following a brief period of study at Livorno's naval academy. Both Falcone and Borsellino met again at Palermo University. While Falcone drifted away from his parents middle-class conservative Catholicism towards Communism, Borsellino was religious and conservative, in his youth he had been a member of the Fronte Universitario d'Azione Nazionale (FUAN), a right-wing university organization affiliated with the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano. However, both never joined a political party and although the ideologies of those political movements were diametrically opposed, they paradoxically shared a history of opposing the Mafia. Their different political leanings did not thwart their friendship. Falcone wanted a naval career but his father thought him too independent minded for the armed forces, and sent him to study law.

Graduating in 1961, Falcone began to practice law before being appointed a judge in 1964. Falcone eventually gravitated toward penal law after serving as a district magistrate. He was assigned to the prosecutor’s office in Trapani and Marsala, and then in 1978 to the bankruptcy court in Palermo.