Sociologist, organizer, writer. Studied architecture in Rome and Milan. Worked first with Don Zeno Saltini in the boys' town Nomadelfia after the war, before settling in Sicily in 1954. Chose partinico (provincia de Palermo) in an area notorious for banditry and proverbial poverty. He first organized local protests over unemployment, housing and medical conditions, and the education of children. Founded the Study Center at Partinico, which remains a source of aid for social and above all agricultural projects. The emphasis is on self-help, with minimum official intervention. Dolci is a committed believer in passive resistance, with a genius for propaganda and spreading information by radio, the papers, TV and through his books in which the Sicilian poor speak for themselves about the conditions of their existence. Gino O's experiences are also the basis of his political education.

Main works:
Outlaws
Report From Palermo(1959)
Waste

From: THE STORY OF GINO O.

It was mainly on account of all the misery and hardship I'd been through that I became a Communist. To me communism meant a new life for people, it meant work for everybody, salvation for everybody; it meant a world where there wouldn't be any need for a Sciabbica since no one would be driven to steal any more--there'd be no more light-fingered characters left, except kleptos. A world where men could live like men--that's what communism stood for to me. Let me tell you how I became a member of the Party.

After the American forces had occupied Sicily we all existed by dealing in the black market. I sold contraband cigarettes in my shop--I got them direct from a customs guard--and as ever barber in Palermo was doing exactly the same thing, I had no scruples about it. With the money I made in this way, I was able to buy food for my family, but all over the city people were starving. The sight of so much misery, the awful injustice of it, stirred me up to such anger that at last I resolved I had to try to do something about it. So I shut myself up in the room at the back of the shop, and after a lot of thought, wrote a manifesto that ended with the words: "Long live Stalin! Long live Roosevelt! Long live Italian communism!" I scraped up enough money to have a number of copies printed, got some friends together and formed the Antifascist Action Party. We plastered the walls with this manifesto of mine, handed it to passers-by in the crowded streets in the center of the city.

One day while I was busy in my shop a shiny American car drove up outside. "An important customer," I thought, and I asked my wife to get some a clean towel. The next minute, in walked a bunch of U.S. officers who told me they'd come to arrest me for disobeying General Alexander's directive. "Haven't you read it? they demanded. "Don't tell us you didn't know what his orders were." But I didn't know what they were; all I knew was that people were dying of hunger. I was tried by the military tribunal and sentenced to one year, but the sentence was commuted.

Soon after this I received a visit from a schoolteacher who had heard about my manifesto; he invited me to attend a Socialist meeting with him. As all political meetings were strictly banned, it was held in secret. I went to a few more meetings with him, and at one of them a certain resolution was put to a vote. I was against it, and I was so outspoken that I was severely reprimanded. I had applied for membership, but I had grown very sick of the Socialist Party's jabber-jabber-jabber--it was actions, not words, that I wanted.

When the ban on political meetings was lifted I started to attend them. I became active on my own account, and organized a mass demonstration of barbers. The day it was held a Communist came up to me and said, "Why don't you join the Party?" This was in 1943, when anybody who wanted to join the Party was free to do it. As soon as I got my Party card, I was made responsible for a cell in my street, and a little while later I was promoted to leader of a section. I read all the literature eagerly, not only because it helped me understand the doctrine of the Party but because I always had a thirst for knowledge. I got up a workers' study group, and we started with Marx. I sweated over his dialectical materialism for months before I could get the full meaning of it into my head. We followed Marx with Gramsci's La Citta'… del Socialismo, from which I learned an enormous amount. It taught me, for instance, that society is like a train made up of old, dilapidated coaches pulled by a streamlines, up-to-date engine. Each coach stands for a system of government that's been tried in the past, and each one has its own characteristics, its own weaknesses. The trip is very difficult and slow because first a door'll come unhinged, then a screw'll work loose in one of the coaches; the driver has to stop, and the passengers have to join in to fix things. Then, thanks to their united effort, the damage is repaired, the train starts off again, and so little by little, it pulls nearer to its destination, the city where all men are equal....

Well, I picked up a Marxist culture, and at the same time went on working in my shop. But a barber can't make much in Palermo, and as I now had four children, I was in bad need of some other job that would help me make ends meet. One day a comrade who'd had a decent education said to me, "Why don't you join the Agricultural Workers' Federation and take the study course?" I took his advice and enrolled for the political correspondence course that the party had just started.

I took tremendous pains to learn and I worked hard at my books; I realized that the more I knew, the more use I would be to the Party. "Learn all you can' the revolution is a revolution of men. The revolutionary movement needs new and responsible leaders." These words of Gramsci's had become my inspiration. I sat up till all hours, and to save electricity I studied by candlelight. But in my eagerness to go ahead I drove myself much too hard; though I didn't realize it, I was close to a breakdown. I grew more and more depressed. I told myself it was hopeless, that I was no good, that I'd never get anywhere. Finally, I wrote to the heads of the correspondence school in Rome to ask them whether they thought there was any use in my going on with the course; I was beginning to doubt, I said, that the Revolution would ever take place in my lifetime. Nothing could have encouraged me more than the reply I got. "To continue studying in such difficult conditions as yours is a positive gain in itself," it said. "As for the Revolution, bear in mind that history can't be measured by the span of a man's life." The content and opinions expressed on this Web page do not necessarily reflect the views of nor they endorsed by the University of Georgia or the University System of Georgia.