TUTTE LE MANI DEL MAFFIA’S BLOW UP BOOK REVIEW :: MAY 2026 ISSUE :: BY MARCO RICOMPENSA
Collettivo Maffia — Tutte le mani del Maffia · Rizosfera · 300 pp. · €45.00
There are two compliments that simply have to be paid to Tutte le mani del Maffia, the book that retraces the entire trajectory — from 1995 to 2009 — of the Maffia Illicit Music Club in Reggio Emilia, a genuine founding moment for Italian clubbing.
First of all, that it’s a beautiful book. And not only as an object (300 large-format pages in colour), but above all as an editorial project and a piece of design. An enormous iconographic effort, recovering and digitising not just all the photographs of the era but also the flyers and the graphic work of every connected activity — like the magazine UltraTomato or the compilations produced — which were essential to the saga of the Reggio Emilia club and are presented here in an engaging way, rather than in a merely, brutally philological one.
And this ties in with the book’s other great merit, one that’s far from a given: not being hagiography for its own sake. True, the narrative of the electronic scene of those years unfolds through the story of the guests who came to play in Reggio Emilia, and it is obviously only one slice of what was happening in the second half of the frantic nineties (the Berlin scene, for one, is entirely absent). But it’s also a matter of fact that for five years — the period that closes with Fatboy Slim’s first-ever Italian date, on 18 November 2000 — the Maffia represented one of the most significant and avant-garde experiences in that whole nascent world of Italian clubbing that looked to what was going on in England, at the time the nerve centre of the global electronic scene. An experience that spread from little Reggio across all of Italy, not only through the on-site visits of the most die-hard clubbers of north-central Italy, but also via the Rai Radio2 broadcasts (which in ’97 and ’98 aired the Saturday night live from the Maffia), and through the Institute Of Dubbology, one of the very first Italian booking agencies, founded by the Maffia, which brought many foreign DJs to play here for the first time.
If you have even the slightest interest in the “golden age” of Italian clubbing, you can start here — or revive the memory of it — with real pleasure.
Click here for the Book
