Rita Atria

Rita’s story was the subject of a 1997 documentary, One Girl Against the Mafia: Diary of a Sicilian Rebel ("Diario di una siciliana ribelle"), directed by Marco Amenta.

Her mother threw Rita out of the house when she found out that her daughter was collaborating with the police. She did not care that her own son's killer was to be brought to justice; in her opinion – and the deep-rooted Mafia culture she belonged to – the police were on the wrong side of the law. Rita was relocated to a safe house in a seventh-floor flat on the outskirts of Rome, where the only people she knew were her police guards. Borsellino became her lifeline.

Many people regard Rita as a heroine because of her willingness to sacrifice everything, including the affection of her mother (who after her daughter's death destroyed her tombstone with a hammer) in order to pursue justice. She grew from a desire for revenge for her losses to one for justice. Like Piera, Rita was not a Mafia penitent (pentito), as she had not committed any crimes to repent. Because of this, she is referred to as a "witness of justice", a title that has been legally recognised in Italy by the law of 13/2/2001 n. 45.

On 25 July 2008, Piera Aiello was nominated as the president of the anti-mafia association called "Rita Atria".

In 2007, Amenta reworked the documentary into the film The Sicilian Girl ("La siciliana ribelle") with Veronica D'Agostino as Rita. Rita's family has condemned the film. Rita’s niece, Vita Maria Atria, and the Rita Atria Anti-Mafia Association, complained that faces and voices in the 1997 documentary were not sufficiently altered as agreed, endangering her and her mother. In addition Amenta had not returned family footage "entrusted to him in good faith" for the documentary, according to Rita's niece. Vita Maria Atria, who has been in hiding since 1992, said she was tired of "seeing speculation about her aunt's memory." She said: "I don't believe that any of this helps to commemorate my aunt, but only serves economic ends which I really do not consider appropriate."

On 19 July 1992, a Mafia bomb killed Borsellino, less than two months after his colleague Giovanni Falcone had been killed. Rita wrote in her diary: "You have died for what you believed in, but without you, I too am dead." A week later, on 26 July, Rita locked herself into the apartment and wrote a note, which said: "I am devastated by the killing of Judge Borsellino. Now there's no one to protect me, I'm scared and I can't take it any more." Then she threw herself out of the window.

After her father's death, Rita became closer to her brother and to his wife, Piera Aiello. Since her brother was also a Mafioso, Rita was privy to detailed information on the doings of the Mafia in Partanna. She also dated a boy who moved in the criminal underworld. In June 1991, the Mafia killed Nicola Atria. A month later her brother’s widow, Piera Aiello, went to the police and talked – deciding to collaborate with the judicial authorities.

At 17 years of age, Rita decided in November 1991 to follow in her sister-in-law's footsteps, hoping to obtain justice for these murders from the legal system. The first person to receive her testimony was the magistrate Paolo Borsellino, to whom she bonded as a father. She named the heads of the most powerful families and told Borsellino about the war between the Mafia families of Partanna, in which 30 people died. She also named the men who had killed her father and her brother.

Rita was born into a Mafia family in Partanna, Sicily. In 1985, at the age of 11, she lost her father, Vito, a shepherd, who was shot dead by a hit man from a rival Mafia family. Atria’s brother, Nicola, vowed to avenge his father and probably knew who the murderer was.

Rita Atria (Italian pronunciation: [ˈriːta ˈaːtrja] ; 4 September 1974 − 26 July 1992) was a witness of justice in a major Mafia investigation in Sicily. She committed suicide in July 1992, a week after the Mafia killed the prosecutor Paolo Borsellino, with whom she had been working.