"Coppola", "birrittu" or other versions as "cuppulinu" and "cuppuluni", "birrittinu" and "birrittuni". The first one is sure one of the older references to the sicilian hat, of which it is not made however some description or concurs some social identification of reference.
The bourgeois hat for excellence will be, for good part of the 1800's, hard and with high cylindrical dome-shape, influenced as the same time by English and the republican and antiaristocratic feelings ". "the coppola" word sure leads back to the concept of head, "kopf" in German, "cup" in English, leaving to mean a extremely essential connection, nearly natural, to its function of cover of the head.
A connection that does not have need not even of a name, that is not even linked to the shape, the used material or the spread of the name deriving from one of the most important.
Also in the more famous and more banal iconography, the sicialian of the fields then does not cover the head with the coppola. It is the much recent image and the stereotype of the man of the sicilian countries with the black coppola. In truth nor the dress of the festivity neither that one of the job make reference the cap that today we call coppola. The rappresentations of both the apparels, really different between them, show the use of head-dresses leading to the oriental fez, often enriched or decorated with the "giummu" (a kind of band/plume) that comes down on the shoulder, or describe more primitive caps, of which Giuseppe Pitrè makes a careful description in the volume "the family, the house, the life of the drawn sicilian people" from its monumental library of the popular sicilian traditions.
In truth, the instrument of protection of the head from bad weather has been above all rising of cape, supplied of a hood, than also covering the head, left the face clear. And it is the same Pitrè to find that "a lot has been said from amateurs of sociology and easy judges not sicilian about this coat; and some of them have made the same thing with the custom of the bandit, and symbol of "brigandage".
The same observation could be easily reproduced today on purpose of the equation coppola=Mafia. Still Pitrè, describing the traditional crafts, signs to the customs that distinguished the various crafts: the hunter, the water carrier, the palermitan strawberry seller[...]. the all with the ancient wool cap. But is the hawker, who often came down to Palermo from the nerby Monreale, to give the cue to Pitrè for signing to the coppola: "the vendors of Monreale are typical for Palermo, and they would be more, if, to the ancient cap,[...] won't be replaced the coppula, that is the only innovation of the last 30 years".
Also about the "scuparu", the hawker selling brushes who every morning reached Palermo[...], Pitrè signs to the worn dress: "If you remove the coppula, which once was birritta, its custom is the most obvious of ours contrade". Some curiosity "on one's word coppola", confirms its old use as a synonymous of cap: the personage of the "cummari di coppula" (godmother of coppula), the young woman who receives from the puerpera the little berret that the baby had in head during the baptism and, washed it, gives back it with an other new one more elegant. In the descriptions of the country festivals of an affected Sicily, present, for example, in the cinematography of first part of 20th century, reproducing a nineteenth-century scene, nobody of the personages uses this hat, also when (symptomatic is the case of the film "the air of the continent" directed by Righelli with Musco Angelo) is desired to celebrate or however to describe a rural, incontaminated world and to represent one risen of return to the origins.
On the contrary, it is only after, when the stereotype has been diffused, that (for example, in the film "the Sicialian" of Lattuada) to the male protagonist, an effective Alberto Sordi emigrated to Milan and returned in Sicily, is offered, which emblema of the ritual of reconciliation with the origin earth, just the coppola, that already is introduced as a sign of the Mafia.

Freely dealed from the article of Salvatore Savoia (Catalogue of exhibition "Tanto di coppola")