they were ready to go beyond the traditional acts of Mafia violence that had been used against the socialist peasant movement before the rise of fascism in the early 1920s when six socialist militants had been killed in Piana. "Without the consent of the Mafia in Piana degli Albanesi, San Giuseppe Jato and San Cipirello, Giuliano could not have shot at Portella della Ginestra," according to the historian Francesco Renda. Renda, among others, was an eyewitness of the massacre. That May morning he was supposed to speak at Portella. "But I got a bit late and before my eyes this horrific tragedy happened." Renda recalls that immediately after the massacre, the peasants of Piana wanted their own justice, threatening to kill the mafiosi of their county. "I convinced them," Renda remembered, "that that would have been the provocation needed to outlaw the Communists." In the arts Film depictions Salvatore Giuliano is a 1962 Italian film directed by Francesco Rosi. Shot in a neo-realist documentary, non-linear style, it follows the lives of those involved with Giuliano. When Rosi came to Sicily in 1961 to re-enact the Portella Della Ginestra sequence massacre for the film, the trauma from 14 years earlier was still fresh. He asked 1,000 peasants to go back and enact exactly what they, their friends and relatives had been through. Events nearly slipped out of control. When the gunfire sound effects started, the crowd panicked and knocked over one of the cameras in rush to escape; women wept and knelt in prayer; men threw themselves to the ground in agony. One old woman, dressed entirely in black, planted herself before the camera and repeated in an anguished wail, "Where are my children?" Two of her sons had died at the hands of Giuliano and his gang. A deleted scene from The Godfather is an allusion to the events and to Mario Puzo's novel The Sicilian. The scene takes place during Michael Corleone's exile in Sicily. He and his companions witness a parade of communist marchers headed to Portella delle Ginestre and singing Bandiera Rossa. Michael Cimino's 1987 version, a film adaptation of Mario Puzo's The Sicilian, was filmed instead at Sutera and Caltanissetta. The massacre was also depicted in 2009 in Giuseppe Tornatore's film Baarìa – La porta del vento. Literature The novel The Sicilian, a fictionalized take on the life of Giuliano by Mario Puzo, depicts the massacre.