With Bruno Zevi, Paolo Alatri, Carlo Cassola and other schoolmates, he founded the Circolo giovanile di cultura moderna (Youth Group for Modern Culture).

There he dramatised several stories of Giovanni Verga for the cinema and worked for Luchino Visconti on the film Ossessione (based on James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice), which was destroyed in 1943 by the Fascist authorities amid controversy.

He participated in the resistance against the German occupiers in Roma, running Il Lavoro italiano the united journal of the labour unions with the Christian democrat Alberto Canaletti Gaudenti and the socialist Olindo Vernocchi.

Against Elio Vittorini he claimed he was convinced the arts ought to help "men in the fight for justice and liberty,"[2] in a polemic continued by Palmiro Togliatti on the theme of the relationship between politics and culture.

Against Carlo Levi and Rocco Scotellaro, Alicata maintained that the revival of the southern farmers could be obtained through "the alliance and the direction of the working class" which would fight against "the traditional enemies of the South: the agro-industrial bloc, Italian and foreign imperialism.

In August 1966, he denounced the damage done to Agrigento by real estate speculation and in his final speech in the chamber he accused the managerial class of being incapable of protecting Italy's artistic patrimony.