Only southern Italy still has strong mafia roots. Northern Italy is much less corrupt. Southern Italy has the better food though, so it seems the mafiosi at least have good taste in cuisine.
That's not a coincidence. Mafias subsist on corrupting industries and extracting illicit revenue from them. To do this, they need to have a degree of understanding of the industry in question. It is far harder to corrupt manufacturing industries that compete in the global market (northern Italy) than agrarian/food service/tourism industries (southern Italy).
Er, the trend is actually the opposite nowadays, with mafia orgs increasingly moving to the North - because there is more money to be made, and the strong community ethics that previously protected those areas have been massively eroded over the last 40 years.
