Danilo Dolci

Who was Danilo Dolci?

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 almost a cult hero-figure in Northern Europe and the United States. Young people idolised him and committees were formed to raise funds for his work.

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. 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.