ITALY: From the Slums

To Italian government officials, Danilo Dolci's methods for helping the poor of Sicily have always been embarrassingly direct. Sicilians were hungry, so Social Worker Dolci became a hunger striker. When they were sick, he converted a three-room apartment into a clinic. To give jobs to jobless fishermen and farm hands, Dolci set them to work on one of the island's tattered roads in the hope that the government would pay them later; he was arrested and convicted of "invading government ground" (TIME, April 9, 1956). Most recently, in his crusade for decent housing,...