Word: dolci
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Danilo Dolci speaks of Sicily as "the world of the condemned." He is, of course, not the first reformer to set a special value on the outlawed. In St. Francis' Fioretti, you see the same processions of criminals, lepers, the exiled and the tortured, that Dolci writes of in his angry indictments of the island's society. For St. Francis, these were the beloved of God, chosen by him to atone for the greed and spiritual bankruptcy of their fellows. But for Dolci, the outcasts of Sicily are simply a monument to men's obliviousness of one another...
...enemies call him the "Mad Apostle." Admirers call him a saint. Awards like the Lenin Peace Prize, support from both leftist and conservative groups in Italy and Europe, and acclaim from such different figures as Camus and Aldous Huxley make it difficult to determine just what kind of movement Dolci is leading. All that you can definitely say is that Dolci has been able to capture the imaginations of men throughout the world. His movement is non-violent, and he shuns politics as a source of corruption, yet he is attempting a regional development plan for all of eastern Sicily...
...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...
...White Hope. In Giuseppe di Lampedusa's bestselling novel The Leopard, a character remarks: "In Sicily it doesn't matter about doing things well or badly. The sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of 'doing' at all." Danilo Dolci, the erratic but militant Italian reformer who settled in Partinico and runs a series of private settlement houses for slum dwellers that have stirred Italy's conscience, believes that Sicily should import a team of U.S.-trained sociologists to study the roots of Sicily's distress so that economic aid might...