Borgo di Dio is a place where Dolci has done his work of civil, cultural and educational promotion, keeping conferences, international study seminars and interventions for the development of the most depressed areas.
At the end of the ‘60s, Danilo founded in Trappeto the International Center for the organic planning. The center was equipped as a residential site able to host about forty people. Over there, during the years, has taken place a series of seminars organized to connect people and a series of activities organized in Borgo di Dio with other similar associations and realities from all the Italian territory. The center allowed to host personalities like Elio Vittorini, Lucio Lombardo Radice, Ernesto Treccani, Antonio Uccello, Eric Fromm, Johan Galtung, Emma Castelnuovo, Clotilde Pontecorvo, Paolo Freire, and many others. All these friends/supporters of Danilo Dolci’s activity contributed to spread and to test these group workshops, aimed to the research and the creativity, in order to gain a whole training that feeds the spirit and the mind, thus forming a culture that was firstly awareness of own self. The meetings with these people involved directly the local people, they discussed around a circular table to understand together “how people and things could be different”. “Who knows if fishes cry” documents the reflections and the insights of that period and the atmospheres that pervaded those places.
“Every individual is like a calculator-radar, more and more developed in the meetings/matches of work and daily life, able to pick up millions of impressions and data, able to collect and process them often with considerable accuracy: the man, who doesn’t have in him the metric of the absolute truth, to measure which particular needs are, or should be, legitimate and valid, however he has the ability to open, view, analyze, sort, remember, compare, proportion, connect, balance, verify, synthesize, guess, suppose; and he has available in himself a complex process through he can reach to decisive decisions for the future development of his own and the others”.