Dua Lipa wedding: blizzard between residents' posters and Uk tabloid mafia mudslinging
Posters with words such as 'Our square is not your living room', 'Public spaces belong to everyone, we claim the right to live them free from private profit' and 'Freedom of movement' appeared on the walls of the squares concerned in Palermo
Key points
The Telegraph called Bagheria, in the province of Palermo, 'the former hideout of the Sicilian mafia' when presenting the location of Dua Lipa and Callum Turner's wedding reception. The wording was actually even more explicit to begin with, namely without the prefix 'former': the correction came after reactions from Sicilian institutions.
The Telegraph, in the same article describing the first day of celebrations in Palermo, referred to Bagheria as part of the 'triangle of death', citing an abandoned nail factory used, according to the newspaper, to eliminate and dissolve victims of organised crime in acid. The article also mentioned Bernardo Provenzano, with photos.
And again: the Sun headlined 'Sun, sea and sopranos, the island's brutal past loved by the stars', with a subtitle describing Cosa Nostra as the organisation that 'ruled Sicily with an iron fist for 150 years', accompanied by images of the Capaci massacre and the arrest of Giovanni Brusca.
Schifani demands an official apology: 'Image damage to Sicily'
These are some of the passages of the articles that appeared in the English media that caused Sicilian citizens and institutions to rise up. First and foremost the President of the Region, Renato Schifani, who took note of the correction made by the Telegraph, calling it 'dutiful', but declared that 'the damage to the image of Sicily and Sicilians has been enormous'. Schifani demanded an official apology from the British newspaper, saying that 'simply correcting the headline is not enough'.
The mayor of Palermo, Roberto Lagalla, described it as 'surreal that in 2026 we still have to fight against clichés that belong more to the imagination of those who use them than to the reality of the facts', emphasising the city's 'long, difficult and often painful path to redemption'.
