Among the authorities announcing her death was Palermo Mayor Leoluca Orlando, who stood vigil next to her coffin during her wake in city hall on Thursday, a day after her death.

No cause of death was cited, but Battaglia had been in frail health for some time.

Much of her work, predominantly in black-and-white, explored the everyday lives of those who lived in Palermo’s poor neighbourhoods, where Cosa Nostra bosses held sway.

Battaglia photographed ordinary Sicilians in moments of grief and joy.

Among her noted photos was that of the body of Sicily’s assassinated governor being held by his brother.

Battaglia recounted how, on January 6, 1980, she raced to the scene of a fatal shooting of a man in a car and began photographing it, before she knew who the victim was.

Only shortly later would she learn that the deceased was the governor, Piersanti Mattarella, and that one of the men rushing to hold his body as it was removed from the car was his brother, Sergio, who 35 years later would become Italy’s president.

Battaglia said while she captured a scene of death, for her it represented a moment of hope as Sergio Mattarella would have the resolve and courage to follow a political career and later hold Italy’s highest office.

Besides death in Palermo’s streets, Battaglia photographed their life.

The cover photo of a book of her photographs, Palermo amore amaro (Palermo Bitter Love) features a thin young girl holding a soccer ball and giving the camera a hard look as she leans against a graffiti-marred door in 1982 in Kalsa, a tough Palermo neighbourhood.

Another photo captures a girl, washing dishes in a home so poor, there’s a toilet bowl in the kitchen.

Other photographs show couples embracing at the beach or kissing in the countryside.

Other photos by Battaglia capture scenes all too familiar to Palermo’s people, especially in the 1980s, when mafia clan turf wars bloodied the city. 

One photo shows a mother, advanced in years, holding the photo of her son, a radio journalist who dared denounce the local mobsters by name on the air — and who was killed, tied to a railroad track and blown apart by sticks of dynamite stuffed into his clothes.

“Letizia Battaglia with her snapshots captured the souls of Palermo,” Senator Pietro Grasso, who formerly was Italy’s top anti-mafia prosecutor, wrote on Facebook in a condolence tribute. 

Grasso said she captured the “sorrow of the victims the arrogance of the mob bosses, the blood on the street, the protagonists in the fight against Cosa Nostra”.

Born in Palermo on March 5, 1935, Battaglia married when she was 16 years old and had three daughters.

In her 30s, she began to take photographs, working in Milan but was then hired by a Sicilian newspaper to work in Palermo.

Battaglia’s work was also published by major Italian newsweekly magazines L’Espresso and Panorama.

Battaglia also spent several years in politics, serving as Palermo’s culture commissioner during one of Orlando’s earlier administrations and as a representative in Sicily’s regional legislature.

- AAP