Inchiesta a Palermo

by Danilo Dolci, Silvio Perrella (Contributor), Aldous Huxley (Contributor)

Un educatore civile, un uomo impegnato, un assistente sociale, un pacifista, un narratore, tutto questo è stato Danilo Dolci che non dimenticò mai la sua vocazione di sociologo. E della competenza e della forza dello studioso è frutto Inchiesta a Palermo, una indagine sugli «industriali» cioè coloro che «s’industriano», si arrangiano: i disoccupati, gli «spicciafaccende», i 'robivecchi', insomma tutta quella massa che a Palermo - siamo alla fine degli anni Cinquanta - viveva ai margini della società e in condizione di degrado. E sono storie di sconvolgente verità.

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1954

About the author

Danilo Dolci (June 28, 1924 – December 30, 1997) 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 (notably, in their English translations, To Feed the Hungry, 1955, and Waste, 1960) 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 (AFSC), 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. Among those who publicly voiced support for his efforts were Carlo Levi, Erich Fromm, Bertrand Russell, Jean Piaget, Aldous Huxley, Jean-Paul Sartre and Ernst Bloch. In Sicily, Leonardo Sciascia advocated many of his ideas. In the United States his proto-Christian idealism was absurdly confused with Communism. He was also a recipient of the 1989 Jamnalal Bajaj International Award of the Jamnalal Bajaj Foundation of India.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

this book was an interesting collection of interviews with the people of Palermo. It is interesting to read the stories and hear the voices. In many ways they are almost exactly like folks we would talk with today in almost any diverse community in which we live. The conditions that people lived in were terrible. There responses were what one would imagine in tough circumstances. The variety of thoughts - sounds very much like what we would hear today on unemployment, on God, and on life in community.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

In REPORT FROM PALERMO, Danilo Dolci offered a slice of life of the unemployed in and around Palermo in the aftermath of the Second World War. Dolci seeks answers to very simple questions. The answers he collects are as simple. There is either seasonal work or no work. There are ways to scrape by and means toward an end. The end is largely to feed one's self and one's family. The authorities are occasionally brutal, typically indifferent. Justice arbitrary. Recourse not applicable. The unhappy answers—largely, impassively, delivered in the first person—suggest a remove possessed only a broken people.

I picked up the book at The Complete Traveller Antiquarian Bookstore a few days before it closed after 30 years in business. In that sense it was a fitting purchase, one that acknowledged lost worlds. The Palermo of the title is not the Palermo I visited in the fall of 2017. But at the time, people were gathering, literally, desperately, wild chicory, asparagus or mushrooms on the roads out of town, or on fields accessible by foot. Wood was snatched, fields gleaned if the landlord was absent. The hungry hunted for snails—three varieties, large, medium and small. Snails eaten as taken and taken home to be boiled with tomatoes. Fisherman fished exhausted water close to the shore. The church and government doled out small sums and bread. Votes were bought with small sums and bread. It was a miserable existence, one to which men and women brought more and more children. Children they could not feed, educate, or raise to a higher station.

Dolci documents poverty. The degradation, the humiliations, the tedium and desperation. Open sewers. Toilets that are holes in the corner of a room. Rooms with no windows. Rooms with no electricity.

There are women of every age and circumstance, who sell themselves for "a dollar a lay" to their Americans liberators, and again whenever the fleet anchors in the harbor. People hustle, broker, procure, although no one admits to stealing. Thieves are murdered. Labor organizers are murdered. Murders go uninvestigated. Murderers go unpunished. Yes, there is mention of the mafia.

Dolci simply records, the reader simply hears a story told by a subject or the reader runs his or her finger down lists that grows tiresome. Nothing grows so tiresome as quickly as a list of complaints and schemes. I suspect REPORT won't be an easy book to find, but it is well worth finding and reading.

Worth reading as a counterpoint to our collective obsession with food. Food consumed by enthusiasts, moralists and the health conscious or by the diet-crazed or depressed. Few people make the connection that this preoccupation is a product of surpluses we take for granted. Unimagined surpluses that allow us to skip meals, and fast for the sake of our complexions.

I realize I've never been hungry. This realization left me feeling nauseous. If this was Dolci’s intention, he succeeded.