Palermo in the 1980s. Fourteen hours from any place in what one might call the civilized world, a city of great beauty but torn by the second great Mafia gang wars. A perfect place for a young crime reporter to get his start. As our crime reporter looks back on his own youth, he lyrically retells four tragic stories that marked him: a Mafioso who refused to become a professional killer; a model whom he loved and couldn't save; a father who succumbed to hatred and jealousy; and a daughter in search of her lost honor. In The Four Corners of Palermo, Giuseppe Di Piazza brilliantly evokes the smell of blood and gunpowder, the averted gazes of a city in lock-down, and the forced hilarity of young people growing up in a Mafia reign of terror who, surrounded by death on all sides, affirm their humanity in each other's arms and beds.