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Christ stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi (1963), translated by Frances Frenaye
661.
Amazon review
This wonderful book is about a world that is now dead. Lucania was its ancient name. Then in the middle ages the name was Basilicata. Then it was Lucania again, restored by the Fascists under Mussolini. It’s on the instep of the Italian boot and it was always very wild, with brigands and peasants and a scattering of bureaucrats and aristos on the top.
Into this world came Carlo Levi, a political prisoner sentenced to exile (1935) in the most remote part of Italy “because of his uncompromising opposition to Fascism.” He only spent a year or so in the village, but he got to know the peasants (and their doomed goats) as well as the stuffy aristos and functionaries. His pen portraits of the place, the crowds of malarial children with yellow faces, the fellow doctors who basically knew nothing, the mysterious women with their white veils and black shawls, are all pin-sharp like verbal photographs.
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Carlo Levi was exiled to a desperately poor village called Gagliano (Aliano) in the Apennine mountains. He vividly describes its ravines and punishing steepness — the entire church had just fallen down the mountain the year before he got there in 1935. His exile was quite polite despite the carabinieri in…
