Word: dolci
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Dolci's complexity is really a radical innocence: he has an immediate and child-like reaction to wrong, and a child's ruthless logic: "I studied architecture in Rome and Milan, but one day I thought it over. In a country like Italy, architecture is for the rich. It becomes the art of putting injustices into stone. So I stopped." Overcoming the resistance of his family--"like all middle class Italian families, they wanted me 'systemized'"--Dolci went into social work. Until 1951, he wrote and published religious poetry, but he now considers himself an agnostic...
...came to Sicily in 1952, with no plan and no particular goal, knowing only that men were miserable there. Sicily was then, and according to Dolci is now, living in its own dark age. He began to draw up an indictment of a corrupt and bandit-ridden society of absentee landlords and what he considers the most oppressed rural proletariat in the world; a society where "violence and misery are so written into the order of things that men cannot even dream of change." The indictment took the form of a series of books whose titles tell their own story...
...Dolci has a map of Socily dotted with black crosses; each cross stands for a Mafia killing since 1945. The eastern end of the map is black with crosses; many of the killed were union leaders. The acceptance of violence in Sicily has led Dolci to put great emphasis on public displays of non-violence; these displays have of course made him more famous in Europe than his more substantial activities. One of his public hunger strikes forced the local government to build a dam for a village. Another form of non-violent protest was his reverse strike...
...center's first problem is winning the people's trust. Sicilians are not apathetic, Dolci insists, or if they are, one has to define their kind of apathy: "they suffer like all human beings, and know that they are suffering, but they do not believe that change is possible." In one village, an agriculturist came and persuaded some of the less suspicious farmers to let him use a few worn-out fields for demonstration plots. He grew vegetables and fruit, instead of the Sicilian grain. "The first year, the people thought he was crazy, but then they saw his yields...
...social worker had started a small school for the village's children, "who in Sicily always roam the streets like chickens." After a time, the people became used to strangers genuinely interested in their welfare, and, "although they still thought we were crazy," they were ready for what Dolci considers the most important step: "they began to think with us how they themselves could change things." Together, planners and the villagers began figuring out what the village needed, what it could do itself, and how the government could help...