A Passion For Sicilians: The World Around Danilo Dolci

by Jerre Gerlando Mangione

The World Around Danilo A Fulbright grant enabled Jerre Mangione to bring this vital book to fruition. As the subtitle indicates, its central figure is Danilo Dolci, the renowned "Gandhi of Sicily," who since 1952 has been conducting a nonviolent crusade against the misery and violence of Western Sicily-that section of Italy where the Mafia has its deepest roots. This is the story of that crusade as well as a sharply etched portrait of the man who risks his life daily to alleviate the shocking conditions in this fabulously beautiful land, still gripped by the fetters of its feudal past. In his struggles against official apathy and Mafia pressure, in his long series of hunger strikes to arouse the public conscience and call for measures that would eradicate the disease of poverty, Dolci has become a striking symbol of hope in a world that is rapidly darkening for lack of spiritual values. Called "St. Francis-with-a-degree" and "Colossus of Nonviolence" by his admirers (and a "fanatical visionary" and "troublemaker" by his enemies), Dolci, with the help of a small band of collaborators, is providing a dramatic example of how to bring the most constructive aspects of twentieth century civilization to countries in all parts of the world where people live on the edge of hunger and degradation. This book is a vivid and frank exposition of Dolci in daily action and of the world around him, the more vivid and frank for the fact that during his sojourn in Sicily in 1965, Mangione was a member of Dolci's staff and one of his closest confidants. But this is more than the story of that experience. It also brings to life the people of Partinieo and the fascinating neighbors the author and his wife knew on the Via Emma, as well as encounters with a Mafia killer, with the Cardinal of Sicily, with a Sicilian princess who defies the law as she spreads the gospel of family planning, with the denizens of Palermo's infamous slums...

369 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1968

About the author

An Italian-American writer best known for his depiction of the lives of Sicilian immigrants in Rochester, New York, in the first half of the twentieth century as their customs blend and clash with those of their adopted country.