Dolci v. Far Niente

Six years ago Danilo Dolci decided to give up studying architecture and do something practical about the poor in Italy. He went back to Sicily's bleak, bandit-ridden "Triangle of Hunger," where he had lived as a boy. There, in the fishing village of Trappeto, with his own meager savings and a few small contributions from outside, he put up a collection of shacks and shanties which he called "the Hamlet of God" to provide shelter for the area's neediest cases. He married an impoverished widow with five children; together they adopted five more childen.

At first government and church authorities beamed on Dolci and his good works, but in time they began to find his excessive zeal embarrassing. Once he went on a hunger strike to force Palermo's government to do something about Trappeto's poor. He won: the government allotted him some $50,000 to begin an irrigation dam in a nearby valley to provide work and water for the local poor. But soon he found himself in trouble with landowners who claimed his dam would drain their own farms dry.

Forbidden to go on with his irrigating, Dolci moved on to another town. Partinico, and began once more to plague those in authority. Without bothering to get official permission, he set up a first-aid station in one of the town's back alleys. A spate of pamphlets poured from his angry pen asking, among other questions, "How many people in Partinico will hang themselves this year?" and "How many will go mad?" Dressed in a thick, white pullover sweater, he was often to be seen waiting in the local mayor's office to demand attention on some problem or other. Last year, after another hunger strike prompted by the death of a child from starvation, Dolci succeeded in wringing a promise from Partinico's mayor that "nobody will ever die of hunger again in this community, and I will do everything in my power to find work for the jobless." But some two-thirds of Partinico's population continued to be unemployed.

Three weeks ago Dolci gathered 200 jobless fishermen and farm hands armed with picks and shovels, and set to work on a local road in need of repair. "We are, not asking to be paid for our work," he insisted. "But of course we hope that when it is completed, the authorities may agree it was necessary and give us something."

Instead, the authorities sent truckloads of carabinieri out to stop the work and haul Danilo Dolci off to jail. There, charged with "subversive agitation," he languished last week awaiting trial amid cries of protest in press and parliament. The Communists of course tried to claim his cause as theirs. But, said Italy's highly influential newspaper, Corriere della Sera, though Dolci's social ideas might be a "bit oversimplified," they are undoubtedly Christian--"the duty of all to help personally those who suffer."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.