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Danilo Dolci
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Danilo Dolci (Sesana, June 28, 1924 – Partinico, PA, December 30, 1997) was a social activist, sociologist, popular educator and poet. He is best known for his opposition against poverty, social exclusion and the Mafia on Sicily and is considered to be one of the protagonists of the non-violence movement in Italy. He became known as the "Gandhi of Sicily".
In the 1950s and 1960s, Dolci published a series of books (notably, in their English translations, To Feed the Hungry, 1955, and Waste, 1960) that stunned the outside world with their emotional force and the detail with which he depicted the desperate conditions of the Sicilian countryside and the power of the Mafia.
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Danilo Dolci (Sesana, June 28, 1924 – Partinico, PA, December 30, 1997) was a social activist, sociologist, popular educator and poet. He is best known for his opposition against poverty, social exclusion and the Mafia on Sicily and is considered to be one of the protagonists of the non-violence movement in Italy. He became known as the "Gandhi of Sicily".
In the 1950s and 1960s, Dolci published a series of books (notably, in their English translations, To Feed the Hungry, 1955, and Waste, 1960) that stunned the outside world with their emotional force and the detail with which he depicted the desperate conditions of the Sicilian countryside and the power of the Mafia. Dolci became almost a cult hero-figure in Northern Europe and the United States. Young people idolised him and committees were formed to raise funds for his work.
In 1958 he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, despite being an explicit non-Communist. He was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), which in 1947 received the Nobel Peace Prize along with the British Friends Service Council, now called Quaker Peace and Social Witness, on behalf of all Quakers worldwide. Among those who publicly voiced support for his efforts were Carlo Levi, Erich Fromm, Bertrand Russell, Jean Piaget, Aldous Huxley, Jean-Paul Sartre and Ernst Bloch. In Sicily, Leonardo Sciascia advocated many of his ideas. In the United States his proto-Christian idealism was absurdly confused with Communism.
Early years
Danilo Dolci was born in Sesana (now in Slovenia but at the time part of the Province of Trieste in Italy). Born of a Sicilian father who was a railway official and a Slovenian mother, the young Danilo grew up in Mussolini’s fascist state. As a teenager Dolci saw Italy enter into World War II. He worried his family by tearing down any fascist war posters he came across.
"I had never heard the phrase 'conscientious objector'," Dolci later said, "and I had no idea there were such persons in the world, but I felt strongly that it was wrong to kill people and I was determined never to do so." He tried to escape from the authorities who suspected him of tearing down the posters, but he was caught while trying to reach Rome and ended up in jail for a short time. He refused to enlist in the army of the Republic of Saḷ, Mussolini’s puppet state after the Allied invasion in 1943.
Dolci was inspired by the work of the Catholic priest Don Zeno Saltini who had opened an orphanage for 3,000 abandoned children after World War II. It was housed in a former concentration camp in at Fossoli near Modena in Emilia Romagna, and was called it Nomadelphia: a place where fraternity is law. In 1950 Dolci quit his very promising architecture and engineering studies in Switzerland at the age of twenty-five, gave up his middle class standard of living and went to work with the poor and unfortunate. Dolci set up a similar commune called Ceffarello.
Don Zeno was being harassed by officials who felt he was a Communist, and even the Vatican turned against Don Zeno, calling him the "mad priest." The authorities decided to put the orphans into asylums and close down both Nomadelphia and Ceffarello. Dolci had to sit by and watch as government forces took off with many of the commune's children, and had to gather up all his energy in the building of a new Nomadelphia. By 1952, he was ready to move on and work elsewhere.
In Sicily
In 1952 Dolci decided to head for "the poorest place I had ever known" — the squalid fishing village of Trappeto in western Sicily about 30 km west of Palermo. During a previous visit to Sicily's Greek archaeological sites he had become acutely aware of the squalid rural poverty. Towns without electricity, running water or sewers, peopled by impoverished citizens barely surviving on the edge of starvation, largely illiterate and unemployed, suspicious of the state and ignored by their Church.
"Coming from the North, I knew I was totally ignorant," Dolci wrote later. "Looking all around me, I saw no streets, just mud and dust... I started working with masons and peasants, who kindly, gently, taught me their trades. That way my spectacles were no longer a barrier. Every day, all day, as the handle of hoe or shovel burned the blisters deeper, I learned more than any book could teach me about this people's struggle to exist..."
In Trappeto Dolci started an orphanage, helped by Vincenzina Mangano, the widow of a fisherman and trade unionist whom he rescued from penury and whose five children he adopted as his own. Later, he moved uphill to nearby Partinico, where he tried to organise landless peasants into co-operatives. Dolci started using hunger strikes, sit-down protests and non-violent demonstrations as methods to force the regional and national government to make improvements in the poverty stricken areas of the island. Eventually, he became known as the "Gandhi of Sicily".
Throughout his career in Sicily, Dolci has used this method, with one of his most famous hunger strike being in November, 1955, when he fasted for a week in Partinico to draw attention to the misery and violence in the area and to promote the building of a dam over the Iato River, which roared down in the winter rains and dried up in the nine arid months, that could provide irrigation for the entire valley.
One technique that he innovated was the "strike in reverse" (working without pay), which initiated unauthorized public works projects for the poor. This earned him his first notoriety in 1956, when he gathered a few unemployed men to mend a public road. The police called it obstruction; his helpers walked away; he lay down on the road and was arrested. Skilfully, he drummed up publicity. Famous lawyers offered to defend him free. Famous writers, such as Ignazio Silone, Alberto Moravia, Carlo Levi, among others, protested. The Palermo court acquitted Dolci and his two dozen co-defendants of resisting and insulting the police, but sentenced them to 50 days' imprisonment (time they have already served) and a 20,000 lire (US$32) fine for "having invaded ground that belonged to the government." On his release he resumed the campaign for a big dam on the Iato river.
Dolci actively fought to assist victims of the 1968 earthquake which destroyed much of the Belice Valley. The funds for relief and reconstruction were siphoned off by greedy administrators, and "Belice" has since become an Italian by-word for political corruption.
Antimafia
Dolci became aware of the stranglehold of the Mafia upon the poor in Sicily. He did not attack the Mafia at first but he did come up against them at once challenging their monopoly of water supply with the project of the Iato River dam. Later he became too well-known in Italy and abroad to be dealt with without too much adverse publicity.
He began his crusade against the Mafia by claiming that government officials were receiving help in their elections from Cosa Nostra. Rather than making his accusations only in Sicily, he would travel to Rome to participate before the Antimafia Commission to ensure that his worries about the Mafia in Sicily were heard. His willingness to stand up to the Mafia in his quest to improve the living conditions of Sicilians helped him to gain the confidence of the locals.
In 1967, Dolci accused at a press conference prominent members of the government, by name, of collusion with the Mafia. Three powerful Christian Democrat leaders, including minister Bernardo Mattarella, reacted violently to his denunciations and succeeded in having him jailed for libel. Dolci responded by broadcasting his opinions over a private radio station, which was promptly closed. However, it would have been too scandalous to send Dolci to prison and the sentence was cancelled.
Popular educator
Dolci became convinced that the key to progress was through education. With the money he received for the Lenin Peace Prize in 1958, he founded the Centro studi e iniziative per la piena occupazione (Center of Research and Initiatives for Full Employment) in Partinico, the village in the Palermo hinterland that became his home.
The centre was one of the most important examples of community development in Italy and especially in the south since the war. It became both a form of self-organisation of local communities and a training school for a generation of socially and politically committed young people, who found their cohesion as a group and attempted to construct a process of social aggregation through the methods and instruments of active non-violence.
Dolci used the Socratic method, a dialectic method of inquiry, and "popular self-analysis" for empowerment of communities. His pedagogical methods, with their emphasis on social awareness and cultural interaction, won him a world-wide reputation, and a small but ardent following at home that took his ideas, over the years, across Sicily and into mainland Italy.
Controversy
The life and actions of Dolci have stirred ample controversy. Authorities were not pleased and actively worked against him. But some of the locals that opposed the Iato river dam were not necessarily pleased to see valleys flooded, gardens and olive trees ruined. Moreover, the contractors eventually were either in the Mafia or served it. Danilo Dolci was always short of, and careless of, money, although he was helped out from time to time, especially by English families whose fortunes came from the trade in Marsala, the sweet wine of Sicily.
Long-time Palermo archbishop Cardinal Ernesto Ruffini publicly denounced Dolci and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, author of The Leopard, as well as the Mafia, for "defaming" all Sicilians.
In 1968 Dolci was accused of embezzling overseas funds sent to help the victims of the earthquake which destroyed much of the Belice Valley. At the same time, some of his followers accused him of excessive authoritarianism and left to set up their own educational centres. Some of Dolci's later initiatives were less successful than others, often bordering on the intangible. His centre sought to produce evidence against a secret NATO submarine base off the Sicilian coast on the basis that such an installation required Italian approval and control which in this case was apparently granted covertly to the United States Navy.
The smears certainly succeeded in pushing Dolci out of the limelight in Italy - for the last 20 years of his life he disappeared from public view. But he continued to be revered abroad, winning prizes for his poetry, and working as a guest lecturer at universities.
Legacy
Dolci has been proposed for the Nobel Peace Prize, denounced by the Cardinal Archbishop of Palermo; he has won the support of many Communists and some Jesuits, been threatened by the Mafia, and been prosecuted for obscenity by the Italian government for his book Inchiesta a Palermo (Report from Palermo).
Dolci was a great writer. His books are remarkable accounts of the society he surveys, and their accuracy and insight have helped to give a realistic basis to any schemes for improvement. Above all he has given a voice to the abandoned, forgotten, despairing, nameless, suffering people of Sicily. Unforgettably he enabled peasants and fishermen, mothers and prostitutes, street urchins, outlaws and bandits, police and mafiosi to tell their stories.
He refused to answer to anybody and never joined a political party despite several invitations from the Italian Communist Party to run for office. "Reality is very complex," he said. "To understand it, men have tried Christianity, liberalism, Gandhiism, socialism. There is some truth in all solutions. We are all mendicants of truth." In the 1970s he rebelled against the state monopoly on broadcasting and set up his own radio station in Partinico in the face of stiff resistance from the police.
Dolci died on December 30, 1997, from heart failure. He was survived by the five adopted children he had with his first wife, Vincenzina, and by two children from his second marriage. His death has triggered a curious mixture of reactions. While the chief Antimafia prosecutor in Palermo, Gian Carlo Caselli, said Dolci was one of the people who gave him the keys to do his job, the national press gave him surprisingly short shrift, describing him as a historical curiosity whose work has long since been forgotten.
If the world now knows anything about the dark, secretive world of the Sicilian Mafia in the first turbulent years after the Second World War, it is largely thanks to Danilo Dolci. The man who in youth studied architecture had become the architect of social change.
His papers are currently housed at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.
Books in English
- To Feed the Hungry (1955/1959), London: McGibbon & Kee.
- (1960/1981), New York: Pantheon Books.
- Waste (1964), New York: Monthly Review Press
Biographies
- McNeish, James (1965). Fire Under the Ashes: The Life of Danilo Dolci, London: Hodder and Stoughton.
- Mangione, Jerre (1968). A Passion for Sicilians: The World around Danilo Dolci, New York: William Morrow and Co.
External links
- , by Jaclyn Welch
- , by Frank Walker
- by Andrew Gumbel, The Independent, January 1, 1998.
- , The Economist, January 10, 1998.
- Swarthmore College Peace Collection.
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