page_title: Danilo Dolci
section_title: Death and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Danilo Dolci / Death and legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Danilo Dolci (left) and Giuseppe Impastato (right), the Anti-Mafia activist that was killed in 1979, in March of protest and peace organized by Danilo Dolci on March 1967. Italiano: Marcia della protesta e della pace organizzata da Danilo Dolci nel marzo del 1967. A destra Peppino Impastato e a sinistra Danilo Dolci.
context_page_description: Danilo Dolci was an Italian social activist, sociologist, popular educator and poet. He is best known for his opposition to poverty, social exclusion and the Mafia on Sicily, and is considered to be one of the protagonists of the non-violence movement in Italy. He became known as the "Gandhi of Sicily".
  In the 1950s and 1960s, Dolci published a series of books that stunned the outside world with their emotional force and the detail with which he depicted the desperate conditions of the Sicilian countryside and the power of the Mafia. 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.
  In 1958 he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, despite being an explicit non-Communist. He 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.
context_section_description: 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 (Report from Palermo).
  Dolci was a great writer. His books are remarkable accounts of the society he surveys, and their accuracy and insight have helped to give a realistic basis to any schemes for improvement. Above all he has given a voice to the abandoned, forgotten, despairing, nameless, suffering people of Sicily. Unforgettably he enabled peasants and fishermen, mothers and prostitutes, street urchins, outlaws and bandits, police and mafiosi to tell their stories.
  He refused to answer to anybody and never joined a political party despite several invitations from the Italian Communist Party to run for office. "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." In the 1970s he rebelled against the state monopoly on broadcasting and set up his own radio station in Partinico in the face of stiff resistance from the police.
  Dolci died on December 30, 1997 in Trappeto, from heart failure. He was survived by the five adopted children he had with his first wife, Vincenzina, and by two children from his second marriage. His death has triggered a curious mixture of reactions. While the chief Antimafia prosecutor in Palermo, Gian Carlo Caselli, said Dolci was one of the people who gave him the keys to do his job, the national press gave him surprisingly short shrift, describing him as a historical curiosity whose work has long since been forgotten.
  According to the obituary in The Independent: "If the world now knows anything about the dark, secretive world of the Sicilian Mafia in the first turbulent years after the Second World War, it is largely thanks to Danilo Dolci." The man who in his youth studied architecture became an architect of social change.
  For long, he was practically unknown in his native Slovenia. In 2007, however, an exhibition on his life and work was organized in his native town of Sežana. In 2010, a book of his poetry was first translated into Slovene. The same year, a bilingual memorial plaque was placed on his native house, and a local educational organization was named after him. His papers are currently housed at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.
caption: Danilo Dolci (left) and Giuseppe Impastato (right), the Antimafia activist who was killed in 1978
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