The path that led to the constitution of the modern State, in the form we know, has been theorized as founded on a set of factors that are both strictly material and properly ideal. What relationship can be drawn between this process and the permanence in our country of mafia criminal organizations? What are the characteristics that these take on from a concrete point of view and on the side of the social imaginary? What role does a secularization of religious structures and a relative mindset, which accompanied a certain path of modernity, play in this?