Italian photographer and anti-mafia fighter Letizia Battaglia has died aged 87.
This became known on Thursday night.
"A great photographer, a great Italian woman," Minister of Culture Dario Franceschini praised the Sicilian, who with her art and her pictures promoted the fight against crime and for more civil commitment.
Born in Palermo, the photographer was a star of Italian photojournalism.
With her countless pictures of mafia crimes in the 1970s and 1980s, she became a chronicler of that time in Sicily, which was shaped by the Cosa Nostra clans.
"My pictures are accusations," she told the German Press Agency in 2019. "I am a messenger of resistance, resistance to violence, corruption, poverty, to moral and political chaos." She repeatedly photographed corpses and victims of the mafia .
One of her most poignant images shows a desperate man pulling a lifeless body from a car in Palermo in the early 1980s.
The dead man was Sicily's President Piersanti Mattarella, the other man his brother Sergio - now the President of Italy.
Battaglia - the name means "fight" or "battle" - mainly photographed for the left-leaning daily newspaper "L'Ora".
She stopped with the mafia pictures after the two judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were killed in bombings in 1992.
Battaglia knew the lawyers personally.
The artist was exhausted, shocked, stunned by the never-ending violence.
The photographer was also involved in Sicilian politics.
"Palermo loses an extraordinary woman, a point of reference," Mayor Leoluca Orlando wrote on Twitter.
Battaglia was recognized in the art world as "a figurehead in the liberation of the city of Palermo from the clutches of the Mafia".