Background

Danilo Bruno Pietro Dolci was born on June 28, 1924, in the Karstic town of Sežana (now in Slovenia), at the time part of the Italian border region known as Julian March. His father was an agnostic Sicilian railway official, while his mother, Meli Kokelj, was a deeply Catholic local Slovene woman. 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.

Education

Dolci attended architecture and engineering educational establishments in Switzerland but quit them at the age of twenty-five in 1950.

Career

Although a conscientious objector during World War II, Dolci served in the Italian Army after the war. He began doing social work in 1950 at Nomadelfia, a religious community in Italy for homeless children. From 1952 to 1957 he was a social activist in Trappeto and Partinico, Sicily.

His first notoriety came 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—Ignazio Silone, Alberto Moravia, Carlo Levi, among others—protested. The Palermo court gave him 50 days in prison.

On his release, he began to campaign for a big dam on the Iato river, which roared down in the winter rains and dried up in the nine arid months.

In 1958 Dolci founded the Centro Studi e Iniziative in Partinico and a number of social study centres. The centre was one of the most important examples of community development in Italy and especially in the south since World War II. 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.

Throughout 1963 and 1964, Dolci and his assistant Franco Alasia had been gathering evidence on the links between the Mafia and politicians for the Commission. At a press conference in September 1965, they presented dozen of testimonies of people who had supposedly seen Bernardo Mattarella (father of the current President of Italy, Sergio Mattarella) and Calogero Volpe meeting with leading mafiosi. Mattarella and Volpe sued Dolci and Alasia for libel.

Dolci made an application for an amnesty but was sentenced to two years imprisonment for libel along with heavy fines. Alasia received a sentence of one and a half year. They never served the verdict, because of a pardon.

The last 20 years of his life he disappeared from public view, although he continued to be revered abroad, winning prizes for his poetry, and working as a guest lecturer at universities.

Achievements

• Dolci was best known for his opposition to poverty, social exclusion and the Mafia on Sicily, and is considered to be one of the protagonists of the non-violence movement in Italy. Dolci was also regarded as the “Sicilian Gandhi”. His social activism, studies, and numerous books and articles brought the plight of the Sicilian peasantry to the world, thereby helping to put an end to the widespread poverty and illiteracy in the region.
  
  His efforts were recognized with the International Lenin Peace Prize awarded to him by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in 1958 and several nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. His written works include Banditi a Partinico (translated by R. Monroe and released in English as The Outlaws of Partinico), For the Young (translated by Antonia Cowan), The World Is One Creature, Poema umano, Nessi fra esperienza, etica e politico, Gente sempbre, and La comunicazione di massa non esiste.
  
  In 2007, an exhibition on his life and work was organized in his native town of Sezana. In 2010, a book of his poetry was first translated into Slovene. The same year, a bilingual memorial plaque was placed on his native house, and a local educational organization was named after him.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Man Who Plays Alone

    (This book caused a sensation in Italy because of the auth...)

    1968
  • A New World in the Making. 1976
  • Sicilian Lives (The Pantheon Village Series) 1960
  • To Feed the Hungry 1955
  • Outlaws 1961
  • Waste: An eye-witness report on some aspects of waste in western Sicily 1964
  • Report from Palermo 1959

Politics

Dolci never joined a political party despite several invitations from the Italian Communist Party to run for office.

Views

Quotations: "Reality is very complex. To understand it, men have tried Christianity, liberalism, Gandhiism, socialism. There is some truth in all solutions. We are all mendicants of truth."

Personality

Danilo Dolci was big and pale, not really Italian at all. He 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. In the United States his proto-Christian idealism was absurdly confused with Communism.

Connections

Dolci was married twice. He was survived by the five adopted children he had with his first wife, Vincenzina, and by two children from his second marriage.

Mother:

Meli Kokelj

First wife:

Vincenzina Mangano Dolci

colleague:

Franco Alasia

References

• Fire under the ashes;: The life of Danilo Dolci
  1966
• Danilo Dolci (People with a Purpose)
  1975