There is a very apt saying by Tolstoy: ‘It is impossible to put out fire with fire, to dry up water with water, and to destroy evil with evil.’ As long as each of us does no evil, we are making them step back, and we are perhaps dreaming of a different Italy.

3.

The Amazing Ability of the South

I want to tell you a story about courage and also, I think, about happiness. The story of a man from the North who moved to the South. Of a man from Brescia, in Lombardy, who at fourteen began working in a steel factory.

It is the 1960s. Union battles are raging, and Giacomo Panizza develops an ardent interest in social issues. At age twenty-three, however, he decides to enter the seminary and become a priest. The bishop of his diocese calls upon him to work with individuals with disabilities, those who are differently abled. With the ‘handicapped’, as some would say. Don Giacomo learns that a community of disabled people in Calabria has asked Brescia for help. There are no support structures, they are often fired from their jobs, their families can’t look after them, the local governments do not consider them to be whole men and women. It’s a story like many others. Except that this young priest gets an idea: rather than moving these people up north, he himself will move to the South.

When he arrives, things aren’t all that easy. Don Giacomo has a strong Brescian accent, he’s lived in Brescia all his life, and spoke his dialect there. Calabria seems like another world, with different rhythms, a different language, another way of being in the world. In addition, his parish is spread out over eight villages and there are logistical problems. Nonetheless he carries on and forms an association called Progetto Sud, Project South: a project that seeks to build community, to bring together people with disabilities and people without disabilities, to discuss the issue of disability. And one that considers the mafias an obstacle to self-fulfilment, to meeting together, to solving problems together.