The refined Italian restaurant setting of elegant wooden tables decked with white tablecloths jarred with the meeting’s gruesome ­purpose – to condemn mafia killings in Germany.

Germany’s Italian community had been “shaken to the core” by the mafia murder last Wednesday of six Italians in Duisburg, western Germany, declared Pino Bianco, owner of one of the 17 Italian restaurants that convened the anti-mafia press conference in Bread and Roses, an upmarket Italian eatery in east Berlin.