Statue Accursio Miraglia - Sciacca

In the Giardino di Piazza Lzzarini is the statue of Accursio Miraglia.

He worked at a bank in Milan but was fired due to “political conflicts” . The managers resented Miraglia's social work, his struggle alongside the workers and his constant quest for justice and equality. He returned to Sciacca and started his professional life in his country. He created his own fishing and canning industry. And later he was also a representative and trader in iron and metals in the port.

In politics, Miraglia was a strong supporter of the Committee for the Liberation of Sciacca. One of the initiatives was the foundation of the cooperative “La Madre Terra" in 1944 which today has about a thousand members with an area of two thousand hectares cultivated with olive trees and more than 200,000 plants that fall within the territory of Sciacca. Thanks to the cooperative “ La Madre Terra”, Miraglia became the voice of the modest people who asked for the implementation of the Gullo-Segni laws that allocated the undeveloped lands of the large estates to the cooperatives .

On the night of January 4, 1947, trade unionist Accursio Miraglia was shot dead as he returned home from a meeting. Sicily had been experiencing major political unrest for several years : farmers mobilized for the recovery and redistribution of vacant land and the end of the land ownership system.

The mafia-agrarian origins of the murder were immediately exposed and the perpetrators and instigators were identified, but some mechanisms and political complications prevented the legal truth from coming to light.

Willem Vandenameele