Piera Aiello is a candidate for Italy’s M5S party – despite being unable to show her face in public

The candidate enters the hall while four police officers remain out of sight. Timidly, with her head covered in a thick black scarf, she greets the audience – dozens of supporters and curious people who have come to listen to her in Salemi, a small village in western Sicily.



“For security reasons, please do not take pictures and do not make videos,” a woman announces into the microphone.

The candidate is Piera Aiello, 51. Her life has been in danger since she witnessed two mafia hitmen kill her husband in 1991. Aiello is now running for the chamber of deputies as a member of the Five Star Movement (M5S) in Italy’s general election on Sunday.

The anti-establishment M5S, which exploded on to the electoral scene in the 2013 general election and champions candidates from nonpolitical backgrounds, is currently the country’s single most popular party, though it is unlikely to secure enough of a majority to govern alone and refuses to join coalitions.

In Sicily, its anticorruption message and proposals to reinforce laws against politicians who deal with mobsters have proved popular, as has Aiello. But running for political office is not easy for someone living under escort, especially in today’s world of campaign trail selfies.

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Aiello cannot show her face in public; she cannot be photographed and cannot freely hold campaign events in the city squares. She often wears a veil to cover her face – “people look at me as [though] I’m some kind of alien,” she says – and has become famous in Italy as the “faceless candidate”.

Despite successful campaigns to curtail the influence against the Cosa Nostra in Sicily and the Camorra in Naples, organised crime remains a serious problem in Italy and abroad. The Calabrian mafia, known as the ‘Ndrangheta, is believed to be the leading cocaine trafficker in Europe.

“The goal of my campaign? Protecting people like me, so that those who decide to rebel against the mafia are not forced to live like ghosts,” Aiello tells the audience in Salemi.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Five Star Movement’s founder Beppe Grillo addresses a rally in Torre del Greco, near Naples, last month. Photograph: Cesare Abbate/EPA

Aiello was born in Partanna, a town in the province of Trapani. At the age of 14 she met a boy, Nicolò. He was the son of the Sicilian mafia boss Vito Atria, but Aiello did not know this at the time. She only found out, she says, when, one day, Don Vito obliged her to marry his son, “otherwise he would have killed my whole family”.

Aiello was forced to marry a man she did not love, a man who beat her and forced her to live in a world she hated. “I took the pill because I did not want to have children with him. When he found out he took his fists to me,” she tells the Guardian.

On the morning of 18 November 1985, her father-in-law was killed in the vineyards of the Trapani countryside. Nicolòswore to kill his father’s killers. He talked about it too much, until a rival mafia clan decided to kill him as well.

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“We had a pizzeria in Partanna,” Aiello says. “Two men entered the room in the evening. They had guns. They looked my husband in the face and fired. He fell before me, covered in blood. I knew them. They were two mafia killers and they had known my husband since they were children. I could not stand my husband, but he was still a boy. He was only 27 when he fell into my arms, riddled with bullets.”

Aiello wanted no part of the life she had been forced into, and the next day ran to the marshal of the Carabinieri, who advised her to go to Palermo, Sicily’s capital, to talk to the only man who could be trusted: a magistrate named Paolo Borsellino.

“Borsellino was like a father,” Aiello says. “He told me that my choice would mean sacrifices. He advised me to leave Sicily immediately and to rebuild my life, under a false name, far from the island.”

Aiello left Sicily with her three-year-old daughter. “While my peers went to the beach, I spent my time in the police station telling the secrets of my husband’s mafia family.’’

Her testimonies led to the arrest of dozens of people. A few months later, on 19 July 1992, the mafia killed Borsellino with a car bomb in Via D’Amelio, Palermo.

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Aiello was destroyed. After deciding to testify, she entered the state protection program, meaning she could not open a bank account, she could not install a telephone line and she could not register her daughter at school.

“I decided to denounce the mafia, and while the mobsters were on the loose, I was forced to live like a prisoner,” she says. “It was not right.”

Aiello decided to devote her life as an activist to defending the rights of witnesses of justice. Some were entrepreneurs who, after deciding to testify against the mafia, had lost their companies and ended up on the streets.

“I have decided to stand so those who rebel against mafia and corruption are not marginalised by the state, but rewarded,” she says. “I decided to become a candidate because I, Piera Aiello, want my face back.”