Six years ago Danilo Dolci decided to give up studying architecture and do something practical about the poor in Italy. He went back to Sicily's bleak, bandit-ridden "Triangle of Hunger," where he had lived as a boy. There, in the fishing village of Trappeto, with his own meager savings and a few small contributions from outside, he put up a collection of shacks and shanties which he called "the Hamlet of God" to provide shelter for the area's neediest cases. He married an impoverished widow with five children; together they adopted five more childen.
At first government and church authorities...