ITALY: From the Slums

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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, 33-year-old Danilo Dolci outraged official sensibilities with a book depicting the miseries of Palermo's slum dwellers.

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. We keep the door open to breathe better."

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.

The 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 will be handed over to a committee to establish what he called "a research institute for full employment."