Piera Aiello knows how it feels to lose everything: to have a husband murdered in front of her, to say goodbye to family and leave home with two bags in one hand and a four-year-old daughter in the other, to change her name and lose friends and family to the senseless violence of a criminal organization which has ruled her land, and her life, since the time before she understood that it had always been there, luring her into its darkness.

Nevertheless, she persisted. She fought, day after day, to have her life back, to give a better future to her daughter and all those she was leaving behind when she left her hometown of Partanna, in Sicily, to become an antimafia witness. 

Her courage and her persistence brought her to become the first antimafia witness elected to Parliament in Italy.

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"I'm definitely Piera Aiello," she tells CGTN. "I took back my name, with all the risks, but I don't care at all – if one day I die, I want to die with my name, I want it in giant letters on my grave."

After 30 years as an antimafia witness living under protection, using a different name, Aiello has finally taken back her identity, at the end of a legal process that only concluded in February. 

It was a long journey, one that started when the Sicilian mafia was not yet the international drug-trafficking business we know it to be today – but just as scary and insidious.

"We all have a family we care about"

Aiello enjoyed a simple and happy childhood in her native Partanna, a small village on the western coast of Sicily. Her parents were normal people with normal jobs: Her mother was a tailor, her dad a bricklayer.

Her life changed when, at 14, she met Nicolò (known as Nicola) Atria, the son of the mafia boss Don Vito Atria. 

"But then I didn't know he was the son of a mafia boss," says Aiello. "I thought it was one of these passing crushes, you know, a young love, because I was only 14."

After a few years of dating Nicolò and spending time with his family, Aiello sensed that something was off. "My dad had always taught me to follow the rules, to abide by the law, but there I didn't see this happening."

When Aiello heard from a friend that Don Vito was a mafia boss, she confronted him about it. He defended himself saying that the rumor was born out of his actions as a 'peacemaker' for the town. 

Aiello, unconvinced, decided to leave Nicolò – only to receive a visit by Don Vito shortly after, threatening that if she didn't marry his son, something bad might happen to her family.

"You'll always be my daughter-in-law," he said, "because we all have a family we care about."

Aged just 18, Aiello married Nicolò, hoping to one day take him away from his family. But while they were still honeymooning in Madrid, on November 18, 1985, Don Vito was murdered by a rival mafia family – an assassination which involved Matteo Messina Denaro, now considered the unchallenged boss of all bosses of Cosa Nostra and on Italy's Most Wanted list since 1993.

Answering to mafia codes of honor, Nicolò decided to avenge his father, continuing a feud that eventually led to his own death.

"He got murdered in front of my eyes on June 24, 1991 in the pizzeria we owned at the time," says Aiello. Nicolò was 27 years old.

"I was an eyewitness of this murder, and even if the hitmen wore hoods on their faces I recognized them, because between those who shot my husband were some of his childhood friends."

"I decided that all of this had to end"

During the years of abuse and beatings from Nicolò that marked her marriage, Aiello had always fought against her husband's involvement in the mafia. When she found drugs, she'd flush them down the toilet. She kept secret diaries detailing illegal activities around her: the names of criminals and the hiding places of drugs and stolen goods.

"On the same day of my husband's murder I decided that all of this had to end," she says. "My town was the town of orphans and widows, there was not a family without someone who had been killed either because they were a criminal or because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Aiello decided that her daughter Vita, only four years old at the time, deserved a better life outside the shadow of her father's family. With this goal in mind, she went to the local police station and announced she wanted to become an antimafia witness. 

She was directed to district attorney Paolo Borsellino, who with Giovanni Falcone had just conducted an investigation which had led to the arrests of hundreds of mafiosi in Sicily. The two developed a strong friendship, with Aiello and her sister-in-law, Rita Atria – who had also decided to become a witness against her own family – affectionately calling the district attorney Uncle Paolo.

On July 19, 1992, about a year after Aiello had become an antimafia informant, Borsellino was murdered by a car bomb in Palermo, two months after Falcone had been assassinated in the same way. 

Their deaths represented a major setback in Italy's battle against the mafia. Not only had the state lost two expert prosecutors, but the mafia's terror campaign started to work on those who would have helped them.

"Many between witnesses and collaborators retracted their choice to testify against the mafia," says Aiello, who made the opposite decision. "Because he died – and he died for us too, because he exposed himself – I chose to continue my journey." 

A week later, Rita Atria jumped off the seventh floor of the building where she was living under protection, leaving a letter saying she was afraid the "mafia state" would now win and all those who were fighting against it would be killed. 

Again, it only hardened Aiello's resolve: "I continued for her, too."

"This year it will be 30 years that I've been an antimafia witness"

Two years after approaching Borsellino, Aiello was forced to leave Sicily and live under a different name, in hiding, for 27 years. She met a man, fell in love, remarried and started a new family. Nobody apart from her daughter Vita and her husband, knew her real name.

"It's not nice because all of a sudden you have another name," says Aiello. "It's like losing your roots. Psychologically, changing your identity is devastating."

She took back her name when she was elected to Italy's Parliament in 2018 after campaigning anonymously with the Five-Star Movement, a party she liked because "it didn't have issues with the justice system, they wanted to be good people, they were not people with legal precedents."

Aiello asked to be a candidate in her homeland, Sicily, where she became known as the 'ghost politician'. Because of the risk of mafia threats, she conducted public talks and events with a veil covering her face. 

"I had left with a three-year-old daughter, two bags, one full of things and one full of toys," she says. "I came back after 27 years and I ran for MP. I came back to those lands and the people rewarded me, they believed in me. It's been such a beautiful feeling."

Now Aiello is trying to fight the mafia from Parliament and trying to update the law protecting anti-mafia witnesses and collaborators, making it easier for them to be reintroduced into the workforce.

"It's for those who don't give up"

Aiello, who was chosen among the BBC's 100 most inspiring and influential women from around the world in 2019, is one of the women who are driving change in our world – and making it a better place for future generations.

To do so, she's been fighting her whole life against all sorts of oppression and injustice she has encountered, now including fighting for her voice to be heard in politics. 

"Politics is a bit of a male environment, a bit patriarchal," she says. "But maybe now they're starting to understand that women are very important – not because I'm a woman myself, but women can offer something more on certain topics.

"We can say we don't have the same space as men – we can say it's more difficult for a woman, but it's for those who don't give up and move forward, pushing and punching through."

Aiello left the Five-Star Movement last year after the party made what she calls "enormous mistakes" by not giving proper attention to the issue of organized crime in Italy.

"And we're not only talking about mafia, 'ndrangheta and camorra. In this case we're also talking about corruption."

Her fight isn't over now that she has reached the heights of Italian politics. "Today there are only a few antimafia witnesses because, sadly, there is no state able to protect them. Both myself and the witnesses who have started with me took a leap of faith. My hunger for justice and truth was so big I didn't think of the possible consequences. 

"Now people are more informed, they know some things don't work and maybe they don't want to take that leap of faith. But I was never afraid of the mafia."

Video editing: Paula Harvey