Rita Borsellino was born in Palermo on June 2 1945, the daughter of Diego Borsellino, a pharmacist, and his wife Maria Pia. She had an elder sister and two elder brothers.

At Palermo University she read Pharmacy and in 1969 she married Renato Fiore, with whom she had three children.

She had no interest in politics, but after her brother’s assassination she became, as her husband once told reporters, “a whirlwind”, constantly on the move to speak out against the Mafia.

The deaths of her brother and Falcone coincided with a wave of Mafia atrocities on the Italian mainland but also with the nationwide “Mani Pulite” (Clean Hands) judicial revolution which, during the early 1990s, put on trial for corruption virtually an entire generation of Italy’s senior politicians and business people.

Not long after the media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi won the 1994 general election, he turned up at her apartment in Palermo, but she refused to let him in. So he asked over the intercom: “What can we do to defeat the Mafia?” She replied: “Everything, because you are the government.”

Like many on the Left, she believed Berlusconi to be in cahoots with the Mafia. Though he has always denied it, in 2014 his former right-hand man Senator Marcello Dell’Utri, a Palermo lawyer, was sentenced to seven years in jail for Mafia collaboration.