In Tusa, his center of operations is a hotel called the Atelier sul Mare. At the entrance to the hotel is a two-story gold column in the shape of the goddess Nike; above the concierge’s window is the motto “devotion to beauty.” Twenty of the hotel’s rooms were decorated by artists or other notables. The Water-Carriers’ Room, where I slept, is a work by Danielle Mitterrand, widow of the former French president. Crocetta used to sleep in the Room of the Forbidden Sea, which has six overhead screens all showing the same video clip of a wave breaking on a shore. He has also stayed in the Room of the Prophet, which is dedicated to the Italian filmmaker and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini. In that room, the walls and ceiling are made of straw and mud to imitate a house in Yemen, where Pasolini shot many of his films, and beneath the bed is sand from the beach near Rome where he was killed. Inscribed in Arabic is the famous refrain from his 1974 denunciation of corruption: “I know. But I have no evidence.” Instead of a bathroom shower, there is a system of pipes that spray strong jets of water everywhere (“It tends to flood the room,” the guide who gave me a tour said), what the brochure describes as “a great purifying bath where each of us is washed and spun like the car that ran over Pasolini and killed him.”

Crocetta, too, is designing a room. “There will be no separation between it and the sea,” he tells me. “And when you press a button, the bed will come down from a golden dome modeled on the Palatine Chapel in the Palazzo dei Normanni. There will be built-in banquettes covered with golden mosaics, like the ones in Monreale, to relax on during the day, alone or with someone else. The bathroom will have a waterfall gushing from the wall. It will be Arab-inspired, and I’d really like to include verses by the Syrian poet Adonis, one of the great contemporary poets of love.”

He relocated to a nearby apartment for the summer, to avoid tourists and for security reasons, but he maintains a room in the Atelier that has his initials on the door in rhinestones. When I visited, there were piles of clothes on every surface, a table full of creams and a small television on which, in the morning, he watched the Disney Junior channel (he is fond of Peppa Pig, a cartoon about a family of pigs and their animal friends).

The Atelier sul Mare has become a kind of alternative capital of Sicily. Crocetta often convenes executive-committee meetings in the Hall of the Double Dream, where two columns seem to plunge into the wall and shatter it. By day, crowds of people arrive to meet with him, but in the evening only his intimates remain. They call the hotel a “convent,” and when they are in good spirits, they refer to one another as “Sister” or “Abbess.” When I told Crocetta that I felt as if I had dropped into the movie “Birdcage,” but with bodyguards placed outside the doors, he replied, “Unfortunately, it’s not Miami out there, but Sicily.” After a moment he added: “I don’t care. This is how I am. And anyhow I prefer the films of Almodóvar.”

His extended family at the hotel includes a septuagenarian, who prepares meals at all hours (dinners often start after midnight); Giuseppe Comandatore, his personal assistant, who keeps Crocetta’s suitcase ready and is always on the lookout for special ingredients for the next meal; and Michela Stancheris, a former assistant who is now in charge of tourism for the region. (After my departure, a new man, Moussa Ndoye, a Senegalese married to a Sicilian, was brought on as Crocetta’s personal secretary. “Again, I’m sending a strong message of progress in a country where Cécile Kyenge” — Italy’s first black government minister — “was outrageously referred to as an ‘orangutan,’ ” Crocetta said.)

And then there is Antonio Presti, proprietor of the Atelier, who many Sicilians believe is Crocetta’s partner. On the night I arrived, however, Presti told me that he has been with another man for 12 years. Presti has also had his own long struggle against the Mafia. His father owned a cement factory, and Presti learned after his death in 1983 that he had been paying bribes to the Mafia in order to conduct business. Presti knew that if he took over the factory, he would have to do the same, but he was unwilling to pay the bribes his father had paid. “I realized I only had three options: to be killed, kill myself or give up. I chose beauty.” Instead of paying for protection, he invested in works of art, creating an outdoor museum in Tusa. In 1992, a bomb went off in Presti’s hotel, and another in the cement factory. “I got threatening letters,” Presti said. “No one on the street spoke to me.” He met Crocetta two decades ago. “This is the story of a generation that’s now 60 years old,” Presti said. He was troubled by the way that power, whether by the Mafia or by the “anti-Mafia,” was wielded in Sicily and the way that counterculture figures became part of the establishment. “It bothers me a little bit now,” Presti said, “because Rosario embodies the power that I have fought for years. I am interested in Rosario my friend, not the politician.” (Not long after I visited, Crocetta offered him a job in his administration, as a minister of culture, and Presti refused.)

The following night, when I told Crocetta what Presti said, he shook his head in disagreement. “It is not true that politics has nothing to do with the soul,” he said. “Pope Paul VI said that it is the highest form of charity. But then the Gospel also has the passage that says, ‘I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents.’ ”