Married at 16, she had three daughters by her mid-20s and left her husband 10 years later, moving to Milan. She was working as a journalist when editors began to ask for photographs to accompany her features. She taught herself, looking to photographers she admired, like Mary Ellen Mark, Josef Koudelka and especially Diane Arbus.

Back in Palermo, Ms. Battaglia found herself on the front lines of the so-called second Mafia War, which began in the late 1970s and ebbed and flowed for a decade, sparked by the incursion of mobsters from Corleone. Hundreds of Mafiosi were killed in the streets, but so were prosecutors, politicians and law enforcement officers. For years, people bought L’Ora to see who had been killed the day before.

She and Franco Zecchin, then her partner in life and photography, were often the first to arrive on the scene because they had an illegal police scanner, Ms. Battaglia said. “We were always ready, washed and clean — at night, during the day, always ready to race there,” she recalled.

“Now you have the books, and museum exhibits,” she added, “but that life as a provincial photojournalist was really exhausting.”

As she watched the Mafia destroy her island, she became an outspoken proponent of the so-called Palermo spring in the mid-1980s, when thousands of Sicilians began to speak out, even taking to the streets to denounce the Mafia, alongside Palermo’s mayor, Leoluca Orlando, who was re-elected last month for a fifth, nonconsecutive term.

Ms. Battaglia left photography to go into government, first winning a seat in 1985 on Palermo’s City Council and then sitting in the regional Parliament.

Those heady days did not last long, she said. For the most part, the enthusiasm that marked the early days of the anti-Mafia movement in Palermo has given away to the indifference that still holds sway today.