This is the story of Don Giacomo Panizza, a seventy-three-year-old priest and factory worker who left Lombardy in 1976 to settle in Calabria—and never looked back. "I was visiting the Capodarco community in the Marches," he recalls, his Brescia accent still audible, "writing a paper on catechesis and disability, when I met priests and scouts who hoped to welcome some wheelchair users from Calabria who had been abandoned to fend for themselves. That's when it hit me: why move them north? Why not do something here in Calabria, with Calabrese people? And so, barely thirty and almost by accident, I ended up in the deep south."
With a background in metalwork, Don Panizza's initial self-managed group—about twenty people with disabilities and ten staff members—grew steadily. Comunità Progetto Sud, an independent nonprofit based in Lamezia Terme since 1976, now serves not only people with disabilities but also those struggling with addiction, immigrants, Roma, people living with AIDS, at-risk minors, and women in crisis. It is a network of networks, working daily to provide concrete answers to social exclusion. Born to offer alternatives to institutionalization and the deportation of disabled Calabrese to facilities in the north, it has since expanded to address other social needs—always pursuing justice, equality, and the rule of law.
"When I first arrived in Calabria," Don Giacomo continues, "everyone asked me the same question: 'Who do you belong to?' No one understood that we all belong to each other." The priest—who has stood up to the 'ndrangheta (since 2002, one of Progetto Sud's centers occupies a building seized from a mafia clan) and endured constant intimidation—fights prejudice every day. He fights for the rights of those living through these conditions firsthand.
"There is still so much to do in Calabria. We have one-fifth the services of Campania and one-twentieth of what exists in Lombardy. Law 328/2000, for example, has never even been implemented. But compared to the past, something has shifted: we don't work on people with disabilities—we work with them." A revolutionary idea, as he puts it in his latest book, Bad Teachers (published by EDB), given what has been taught about disability across the south and throughout Italy until recently.
"From the start, Comunità Progetto Sud has worked to pull people labeled as handicapped out of isolation. Men and women locked in their homes, marginalized, who finally stepped outside and were reborn—discovering they were precious and children of God. Here, people with disabilities learn that what matters is not what you receive but what you give. Understanding that you don't have to be beautiful, talented, or perfect—but like everyone else, you have strengths and weaknesses."
Among Don Panizza's various programs addressing disability—including a rehabilitation center, a psycho-educational unit for autism, and an information office run by a person with a disability—there is the group home After Us, directed by educator and coordinator Elvira Benincasa. It opened in 2009 on the second floor of a building seized from the mafia in the Lamezia area, welcoming people with physical or psychological disabilities. People without family, or whose parents can no longer care for them, receive round-the-clock residential services in a family-like environment with clear rules about respect and hospitality. Central to this is the value of each resident's personal story. Currently there are six permanent residents plus a seventh on rotating cycles, ranging from fifty to seventy-four years old.
Days do not unfold in isolation. Beyond individual care plans and therapeutic protocols, there are ordinary family routines. Some residents go to the gym, others engage in community activities, someone prepares lunch, then in the afternoon visits the hairdresser or neighbors. Others ride in the center's equipped van. Summer vacations are organized—to the Sila mountains or the seaside. Over time, a happy family has taken shape, resembling all happy families, yet unhappy in its own way (to borrow from literature)—made up of staff, specialists, professionals, cooks, and above all, voices that are finally heard.
"After Us, like all our other centers—including the refugee facilities, safe houses for domestic violence survivors, the legal office for migrants, and all our other recovery programs—is a community where people not only live together but inhabit the territory, the world, and life itself." Starting, of course, from the south.