1. Giovanni Falcone was born in 1939 to a middle-class family in the Via Castrofilippo near the seaport district La Kalsa, a neighbourhood of central Palermo that suffered extensive destruction by aerial attacks during the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943.
Giovanni Falcone's parents emphasised the importance of hard work, bravery and patriotism; he later said they 'expected the maximum' from him.
At school Giovanni Falcone would get into fights with larger children if he thought his friends were being picked on.
Giovanni Falcone grew up at a time when Sicilians did not acknowledge the existence of the Mafia as a coherent organised group; assertions to the contrary by other Italians were often seen as 'attacks from the north'.
Giovanni Falcone wanted a naval career but his father thought him too independent-minded for the armed forces, and sent him to study law.
Giovanni Falcone eventually gravitated toward penal law after serving as a district magistrate.
Giovanni Falcone was assigned to the prosecutor's office in Trapani and Marsala, and then in 1978 to the bankruptcy court in Palermo.
Giovanni Falcone started to work at a particularly tense moment.
Chinnici appointed Giovanni Falcone to investigate the case, one of the biggest Antimafia operations in more than a decade.
Giovanni Falcone was probably among the first Sicilian magistrates to establish working relationships with colleagues from other countries, thus developing an early understanding of the global dimensions of heroin trafficking, while enhancing the meagre investigative resources of his office.
Giovanni Falcone learned that the chemists of the French Connection had moved clandestine labs for refining heroin from Marseille to Sicily.
Giovanni Falcone was plagued by a chronic lack of resources in his capacity as magistrate.
In May 1986, he married his fiancee, Francesca Morvillo; Giovanni Falcone had Mayor Leoluca Orlando himself conduct the private ceremony.
Giovanni Falcone became part of Palermo's informal Antimafia Pool, created by Judge Rocco Chinnici.
Giovanni Falcone led the prosecution for the trial, which began 10 February 1986, and ended on 16 December 1987.
On 20 June 1989, a sack filled with dynamite sticks was discovered near a beach house Giovanni Falcone had rented in the town of Addaura by policeman Nino Agostino.
Giovanni Falcone believed that the assassination attempt not only involved the Mafia but some people in government as well.
Giovanni Falcone received an effusive congratulatory phone call from Giulio Andreotti after the narrow escape.
Giovanni Falcone privately thought it odd that Andreotti, who he had never spoken to, would suddenly contact him, and he mused about the significance of the incident to a friend.
The Mafia began to realize that Giovanni Falcone was even more dangerous in Rome than he had been in Palermo.
Riina wanted the murder carried out in Sicily in a demonstration of Mafia power; he instructed that the attack should be on Highway A29, which Giovanni Falcone had to use to get from the airport to his home on his weekly visits.
Giovanni Falcone was one of Riina's associates and admitted to detonating the explosives.
Giovanni Falcone was posthumously awarded the Train Foundation's Civil Courage Prize, which recognises "extraordinary heroes of conscience".