“A Mediterranean Meditation”

Dear Dante,

If you ever get the urge to update your Inferno for the streaming age, let me offer you some field notes from the Mediterranean’s less-than-divine comedy. I write as a lifelong outsider, although related through my children, still Dutch, and a perennial observer of the curious ways people cling to, sell off, or are chased from their patch of earth.

Books were my first refuge, but The Godfather was the film that let me dream—not of crime, but of kinship. Don Vito Corleone, a patriarch with a velvet voice and a hand in every pie, presides over a family where loyalty is both glue and poison. For those of us who grew up feeling like the odd sock in the drawer, the Corleone table promised belonging, at a price.

Loyalty, absolute and unquestioning, is the currency. Justice? That’s a private affair, negotiated in dark rooms while the law naps in the piazza.
Then there’s The Equalizer—Robert McCall, a solitary avenger with a stopwatch ( a small device used to measure seconds precisely; think of it as a modern hourglass for swift retribution) and a moral code sharper than a Sicilian stiletto. He’s the patron saint of those failed by the system, doling out justice where bureaucracy and indifference have left only dust.

Living in Spain since nineteen and wandering Sicilian villages (from time to time) as an adopted stray, I’ve watched two cultures wrestle with their own capital sins.
In Spain, the “lazy” brother inherits the rocky plot by the sea, sells it to a sunburnt foreigner, and watches the village become a mosaic of regret and real estate agents. The industrious sibling clings to his oranges, proud but increasingly alone. At the same time, the village laments in three languages and the only omertà is the silence at the local bar when the bill arrives.

Sicily operates differently—it’s a masterclass in stubborn pride and organised gatekeeping. Here, families stay put, heritage gets hoarded, and the mafia plays the role of enforcers, sometimes preserving tradition, more often enforcing it with violence. In Calabria, it’s not nostalgia or economics that are emptying villages, but organised crime scaring people away and pressuring them to sell their ancestral homes to development companies. A forced exodus for profit and the slow erasure of heritage.

So, Dante, what’s the capital sin of our age? Is it pride, selling out, or the inability to distinguish virtue from vice when both wear the same cologne? Justice, as ever, is a moving target, sometimes a bullet, sometimes a bribe, always implemented by those refusing to wait for a rigged system to act. The question that has grown through all my observations is this: in our search for belonging and justice, how do we know when we’ve crossed the line from righteousness into something darker?

But here’s where the root of justice finally becomes clear. These anti-heroes we love—Don Vito and Robert McCall—carry something our institutions have lost. They possess what I call the Latin gene: iustitia in its original form, uncorrupted by the capital sins that have consumed our legal systems.

While courts drown in pride, bureaucracies rot with sloth, and laws bend to greed, these figures strip back to justice’s DNA, the primal drive for balance and righteousness that existed before pride, wrath, and envy poisoned the well. They bypass the corrupted channels and go straight to the source code.

That’s why we’re drawn to them. They do what we wish our systems could still do: deliver pure iustitia without the contamination of capital sins. In a world where justice has forgotten itself, they carry its original blueprint.

May Clarity find us,

Irena Phaedra