Sicily: Danilo’s Dam

In the wretchedest slum quarter of Partinico. a pinched little town near Palermo, a man lay starving last week. Friends dropped in to ask “Come va oggi [How are you today]?” and the man would answer, smiling. “Bene, benissimo.’ Over his cot a poster proclaimed: “The Dam Means Wealth, the Dam Means Progress, the Dam Means Confidence!”

Sicily’s angriest and least violent man, Danilo Dolci, 38, was staging a Gandhi-style fast to dramatize the need for a dam across the lato River, which could irrigate some 25,000 acres of parched, stingy land in the northwest. The government assigned funds for the dam two years ago. but, Dolci laments, “Not one stone ‘has been turned.” Danilo and the government had counted without Sicily’s most implacable foe of progress: the Mafia.

Violently resisting any step that might loosen their feudal hold on the pinched and primitive peasantry, Mafia bullyboys scared off government engineers with threats and gunfire, sabotaged machinery for the dam. Landowners, whose fields would be submerged by the backed-up water, turned down the government’s offer of $840 per acre, asked $3,600 instead —presumably on Mafia orders.

A practical idealist, beefy Danilo Dolci quit his career as an architect to come to Sicily’s “triangle of hunger” in 1952. He battled hard against poverty, unemployment and disease and, in the process, has stirred Italy’s conscience. “In the last two years,” he says, “more than 2 billion cubic meters of water have been wasted in the sea in western Sicily alone. Figuring what the land would have been worth if it was watered, that’s a loss of $160 million—while poverty continues to erode hundreds of thousands of families.” At week’s end Dolci won. In Rome, a Cabinet Minister called a meeting to re-study the lato project; in Sicily, even the Mafia began to feel uneasy. With Mafia permission, landowners announced their willingness to accept a new government offer of $1.200 per acre. Crusader Dolci, with victory in sight, broke his ten-day fast and looked around for another windmill of privilege worthy of his lance.