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Italian-American conversations on the mafia: Danilo Dolci visits Philadelphia’s 1961 Festival of Italy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 September 2017

Samantha Owen
Samantha Owen*
Affiliation:
School of Education, Curtin University, Bentley, Perth, Western Australia
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Abstract

In 1961 the peace activist and anti-mafia campaigner Danilo Dolci spoke at a protest event at the Italian centennial of unification celebrations hosted by the City of Philadelphia. The reactions to the talk he gave on development initiatives in Western Sicily provide some insight into the transnational discussion that was developing around the mafia, governance and leadership in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Dolci and his supporters made the suggestion that the problems encountered by the post-war governments in Italy, Sicily and Philadelphia were a result of leaderships which presented or made the appearance of change but did not fix the underlying problems. This article maps how the conversation developed, why the idea of the mafia as a ‘thing’, an operating criminal organisation with Sicilian origins, was such an important narrative, and what it meant for those trying to make a claim to leadership positions.

Italian summary

Nel 1961, Danilo Dolci, pacifista ed attivista contro la mafia, partecipò ad una protesta pacifica alla esposizione per commemorare il centenario dell’unità d’Italia ospitata dalla città di Filadelfia. Il suo discorso sulle iniziative di sviluppo in Sicilia occidentale è una finestra sulla discussione transnazionale della mafia, amministrazione e dirigenza politica nella seconda metà degli anni Cinquanta fino ai primi anni Sessanta. Dolci ed i suoi sostenitori vedono che i problemi dalla amministrazione dopo la seconda Guerra mondiale in Italia, Sicilia e Filadelfia, sono causati da una dirigenza politica che ha semplicemente fatto comparsa del cambiamento, ma non ha risolto i veri problemi sottostanti. Questo articolo spiega come è stata sviluppata la discussione. L’idea che la mafia è ‘una cosa’, ovvero un’organizzazione criminale operante con origini siciliane, è stata una narrazione importante, specialmente per chi voleva vincere una posizione di dirigenza politica.

Keywords

Danilo DolciItalian-AmericanmafiaSicilyItalian centennialdevelopment
Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Italy , Volume 22 , Special Issue 4: Special Issue: The Force of History: Modern Italian Historiography and the Legacy of Christopher Duggan , November 2017 , pp. 419 - 433
Copyright
© 2017 Association for the Study of Modern Italy 

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