Danilo Dolci (1924-1997) was a poet, educator, non-violent activist, and animator of historic battles against the Mafia and for the affirmation of human dignity and social justice in the Sicily of the last century. In a long interview with G. Spagnoletti, in 1977, remembering the summers of 1940 and 1941 he spent in Trappeto, in western Sicily, he said: 'Of course, I remember the world of Trappeto with its terrible misery, but it still didn't say much to me. That town presented itself to my eyes as a landscape, extremely poor in human terms, with its wonderful sea; but I saw the men in the background, as if inside a painting, without perceiving their suffering. Only later, slowly, was it to emerge to me'. In 1952, that suffering which, in his adolescent years, he saw but did not perceive, emerged almost 'like a call', even after spending years at Nomadelfia. In the same year he moved to Trappeto from where he began his action of social change in a land of condemned men. What determined Dolci, some ten years after his first encounter with those poor fishermen and peasants, to feel their suffering and decide for their redemption? Among the decisive reasons for such a radical choice, which was to give rise to one of the most generative community development experiences in the history of republican Italy, is the maturing of a religious sense of life that, again in the interview with Spagnoletti, he summarised as follows: 'we are, or rather, we must be "host to one another"'. Through the analysis of his two early poetic works, Parole nel giorno (1950) and Voci dalla città di Dio (1951) - some pages of which were taken up in 1952 in V. Volpini's Antologia della poesia religiosa italiana contemporanea) I will reconstruct the roots of this religious sense of life in which Christian mysticism, the Christian motifs of sacrifice and charity, and oriental doctrines, such as that of samsāra, which show a strong religious and inter-confessional tension, are merged.