Word: dolci
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Eight in a Bed. Dolci spared the reader no detail, however sordid, of life in Palermo's notorious Cascino Courtyard. There, 200 yards from the city's splendid cathedral, 260 families live in squalor in 210 rooms. Only one family has a toilet, he reported; the rest run the risk of being fined $4 for relieving themselves on nearby railroad tracks. To keep alive, boys resort to stealing, girls to prostitution. "We sleep four at the top of a bed and four at the bottom," said one inhabitant. "My uncle, my husband, my sister, myself and four children...
Before publication, a section of the book dealing with sexual depravity was printed by an obscure leftist monthly. Dolci was arrested, found guilty of publishing obscenities and sentenced to two months in jail. Leftists, intellectuals and even progressive businessmen such as Typewriter Tycoon Adriano Olivetti leaped to his defense; pro-Dolci committees were organized in ten major cities...
...book won the prestigious $1,600 Viareggio literary award, and last month the Rome Court of Appeals reversed Dolci's conviction. In complete capitulation, Palermo authorities announced a program to tear down Cascino Courtyard and the neighboring slum called Hole of Death, relocate their 1,200 inhabitants in new low-rent public housing. It was, said Italians, a victory for the poor...
Reward from Moscow. Last week Dolci won another kind of victory. Praising the "incisive vigor" with which Dolci had depicted the "inhuman conditions" in Sicily, Radio Moscow gratuitously announced that "Peace Partisan" Dolci had won the Lenin (formerly Stalin) Peace Prize. Rome's La Giustizia, organ of the Social Democrats, promptly appealed to non-Communist Dolci to reject an award which "comes from the executioners of the workers in Hungary." Dolci did not even hesitate. "I shall always accept, from anywhere, gifts that help my mission of good works," he said. He announced that the $25,000 prize money...
...decision left Italy as baffled as ever about "Italy's Gandhi." Many Christian Democrats flatly consider him a Communist or, at best, a "useful idiot" for Communist causes. Leftist (but nonCommunist) Novelist Alberto Moravia insists: "Dolci protests, yes. But he is not a Communist." Dolci himself was more lofty. "Reality is very complex," he said. "To understand it, men have tried Christianity, liberalism, Gandhiism, socialism. There is some truth in all solutions. We are all mendicants of truth...