30 Facts About Danilo Dolci

Danilo Dolci was an Italian social activist, sociologist, popular educator and poet.

Danilo Dolci is best known for his opposition to poverty, social exclusion and the Mafia in Sicily, and is considered to be one of the protagonists of the non-violence movement in Italy.

Danilo Dolci became a kind of cult hero in the United States and Northern Europe; he was idolised, in particular by idealistic youngsters, and support committees were formed to raise funds for his projects.

Danilo Dolci was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by the American Friends Service Committee, which in 1947 received the Nobel Peace Prize along with the British Friends Service Council, now called Quaker Peace and Social Witness, on behalf of all Quakers worldwide.

Danilo Dolci was a recipient of the 1989 Jamnalal Bajaj International Award of the Jamnalal Bajaj Foundation of India.

Danilo Dolci's father was an agnostic Sicilian railway official, while his mother, Meli Kokelj, was a deeply Catholic local Slovene woman.

Danilo Dolci refused to enlist in the army of the Republic of Salo, Mussolini's puppet state after the Allied invasion in 1943.

Danilo Dolci was inspired by the work of the Catholic priest Don Zeno Saltini who had opened an orphanage for 3,000 abandoned children after World War II.

In 1950 Danilo Dolci quit his very promising architecture and engineering studies in Switzerland at the age of twenty-five, gave up his middle class standard of living and went to work with the poor and unfortunate.

Danilo Dolci had to sit by and watch as government forces took off with many of the commune's children, and had to gather up all his energy in the building of a new Nomadelphia.

In Trappeto Danilo Dolci started an orphanage, helped by Vincenzina Mangano, the widow of a fisherman and trade unionist whom he rescued from penury and whose five children he adopted as his own.

Danilo Dolci started using hunger strikes, sit-down protests and non-violent demonstrations as methods to force the regional and national government to make improvements in the poverty stricken areas of the island.

Danilo Dolci proclaimed a week of mourning and with 30 associates conducted a hunger strike in the town square of Roccamena in March 1965.

Danilo Dolci actively assisted victims and months after the disaster he announced demonstrations and hunger strikes to demand immediate help for homeless families living in tents.

Danilo Dolci became aware of the stranglehold of the Mafia upon the poor in Sicily.

Danilo Dolci did not attack the Mafia at first but he did come up against them at once challenging their monopoly of water supply with the project of the Iato River dam.

Danilo Dolci began his crusade against the Mafia by claiming that government officials were receiving help in their elections from Cosa Nostra.

Danilo Dolci responded by broadcasting his opinions over a private radio station, which was promptly closed.

Danilo Dolci made an application for an amnesty, but was sentenced to two years imprisonment for libel along with heavy fines.

Danilo Dolci became convinced that education was the key to social progress.

Danilo Dolci used the Socratic method, a dialectic method of inquiry, and "popular self-analysis" for empowerment of communities.

Danilo Dolci's ideas were taken up by a small but passionate group of supporters that took his methods across Sicily and into mainland Italy.

Danilo Dolci was helped out from time to time, predominantly by English families whose fortunes had been made with the sweet Marsala wine manufactured in Sicily.

In 1968 Danilo Dolci was accused of embezzling funds sent from abroad to help the victims of the earthquake which destroyed much of the Belice valley, though the charges were never substantiated.

Danilo Dolci's centre sought to produce evidence against a secret NATO submarine base around Maddalena island off Sardinia on the basis that such an installation required Italian approval and control which in this case was apparently granted covertly to the United States Navy.

Danilo Dolci has been proposed for the Nobel Peace Prize, denounced by the Cardinal Archbishop of Palermo; he has won the support of many communists and some Jesuits, been threatened by the Mafia, and been prosecuted for obscenity by the Italian government for his book Inchiesta a Palermo.

Danilo Dolci never joined a political party despite several invitations from the Italian Communist Party to run for office.

Danilo Dolci died on December 30,1997, in Trappeto, from heart failure.

Danilo Dolci was survived by the five adopted children he had with his first wife, Vincenzina, and by two children from his second marriage.

Danilo Dolci's papers are currently housed at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.