Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,

the past brought to life by those who were there. This week the death and funeral of Egypt's

President Nasser, an event which prompted a vast outpouring of grief.

At times the mourners several hundred thousand strong halted the procession and threatened

to dislodge the coffin from its exposed position on a black draped horse-drawn gun carriage.

Plus trapped Wales in Alaska in the 1980s.

The three Californian gray whales are still huddled together in a tiny hole in the ice.

The hole has been shrinking steadily,

and the whales have cuts and bruises from bashing up against the jagged ice.

German 20th century history etched into a single

building and the birth of Google. Our mission is to organize the world's

information and make it universally accessible and useful and I think that would be a great thing for the world.

That's all coming up later in the podcast, but we're going to begin in Italy where the long

simmering nexus between powerful politicians and powerful mafia bosses burst onto the public stage in the mid-1990s.

That was when the former Prime Minister Giulio Andriotti was put on trial for collusion

with the mafia.

As you might imagine, there's a great deal of murky detail which lies behind this story,

much of which we will probably never know because of the Cosanostra's infamous Omerta, the Code of Silence. Bob Howard though has been speaking

to Dr. Jan Carlo Caselli, who was the head of a team of anti-Mafia prosecutors in the

Sicilian capital Palermo who brought the politician to court.

It's hard to exaggerate how bigger figure Andriotti was in Italian politics in the 1970s and

1980s as the leading member of the Christian Democratic Party.

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