Ardena and others like him—men who made a business of transporting wheat, flour, oil, oranges, cheese, and other produce to mills, city markets, and ports—found themselves at the point where urban commercial prosperity and rural toughness acquired in the school of hard knocks of western Sicily met and could be profitably exploited. Had either of these ingredients been missing, we would not be discussing the mafia today. The countryside provided the opportunities to get started, and the city offered advantageous applications—not after the Second World War, as many scholars maintain, but right from the beginning.

XREF: Challenges the conventional scholarly timeline that places mafia emergence after WWII, instead locating its origins at the very start of the urban-rural commercial economy.

Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Busi…, loc. 242