Waiting Is a Way of Life

In dirt-poor western Sicily, few peasants can read, even fewer can afford to buy a book. So what was anyone talking about in Roccamena last week? Shakespeare, Brecht, Dante, Aeschylus, to name a few of the poets and playwrights whose works were featured in the town's first informal festival of the performing arts. Star performer was Movie Idol Vittorio Gassman, who for two straight nights strode a sidewalk "stage" illumined by car headlights while declaiming passages from Julius Caesar, The Divine Comedy and other works. Whatever they made of it, the Roccamenensi were an appreciative audience.

Actually it was a fast not a feast that brought Gassman, Novelist Carlo (Christ Stopped at Eboli) Levi, poets, folk singers and droves of journalists to the bleak little mountain town south of Palermo. Ever since 1929, when a visiting Fascist minister promised that the government would build a dam near by, Roccamenensi have eagerly looked forward to the day when they would be able to irrigate their parched fields and perhaps even stanch the northward exodus of hungry peasants that has emptied whole villages in the area. In 1952 the government finally earmarked $12.8 million for the project and promised repeatedly that construction would start in no time. Then, last summer, the indignant townsfolk discovered that they had been hoodwinked: the funds allot ted for their dam had been spent elsewhere. To protest their scurvy treatment, nearly 200 townsfolk joined in a 24-hour hunger strike last week.

Roccamena's protest attracted major attention when it was joined by Danilo Dolci, a famed crusader and author who has staged five previous hunger strikes to prod the government into doing more to alleviate Sicily's poverty. Dolci's announcement that he would fast for ten days rallied support from leading Italian intellectuals, would-be intellectuals and influential admirers all over the world. After Dolci had gone nine days without food in a flyblown little room off the Piazza Matrice, the town square, a Christian Democrat bigwig from Palermo announced to the crowds that the government would start building the dam in November 1964 and, if it proved impractical, promised that the money would be spent on other needed projects in the area. It seemed a long time to wait, but then waiting is a way of life in Roccamena.

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