The mafia and the violence in Sicily have not only provided crimes to fill thousands of pages for acts of trials, but they have also provided thousand stories for the best pages of literature. Luigi Pirandello and Antonio Russello write about their island and do it as artists and historical witnesses. They give us an image of the mafia, of the mafia-feeling and of its connivance with society and politics in an accurate and often unforgiving storytelling. An intensive reading focused on just one small village, Favara, is enough to find points in common and to be able to reconstruct in a hermeneutical way a mentality that is so ancient and full of original stories, even if violent, to be an excellent material for the “art made of words”. Pirandello in I vecchi e i Giovani is the first writer of a certain level, who uses the word “mafia”. He describes exactly the dynamics of connivance of mafia with politics. Russello gives us an original literary definition of the mafia in La luna si mangia i morti, using the filter of a child’s eyes that tell us about a Sicily that no longer exists. An accurate reading of the texts by Pirandello and Russello brings us to real pearls in which the narrative gives us the necessary tools to understand the history and the actuality of an ancient and regrettable phenomenon.