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...