Sicilian Lives
Author | : Danilo Dolci |
Publisher | : Pantheon |
Total Pages | : 344 |
Release | : 1981 |
ISBN-10 | : STANFORD:36105025183604 |
ISBN-13 | : |
Rating | : 4/5 (04 Downloads) |
Book excerpt: When Danilo Docli, peace worker, organizer, educator, first arrived in 1952 in Trappeto, a village of peasants and fishermen in western Sicily, there were no streets, just mud and dust, not a single drugstore, not even a sewer. (In fact, the local dialect didn't even have a word for sewer.) Like other Sicilians, the villagers, seen by many Italians as bandits, dirt-eaters, and savages, had, in effect, been mute for centuries. Dolci's years of work broke this silence. The result is Sicilian Lives, a book which reveals the intimate experiences and perceptions of a wide range of Sicilians, rural and urban, through voices that are sometimes frightening, but always fascinating and unexpected. Danilo Dolci has collected a rich panorama of voices--the eloquent testimony of Sicilians who, at last, are speaking out to penetrate the most profound dilemmas of an impoverished land.