Book Review: "Christ Stopped at Eboli', by Carlo Levi, 1945

         Three years ago, the Mayor made a visit to southern Italy to experience that region that is seldom visited by tourists of any sort.   Even Northern Italians seldom visit the South.   Long viewed as a cultural outlier the provinces of Basilicata, Calabria, Puglia, and the Abruzzo were poor, sparsely populated, rugged, hot, and dry.   It was for these characteristics that Benito Mussolini sent his dissidents here into internal exile(confino).  After he became the Fascist leader dictator, his opponents were treated harshly using this method.   Author Carlo Levi was one of Mussolini's targets and sent into exile in a small village in the hills of Lucania(future Basilicata).   Two small towns were the exact locations of his time there: Grassano and Aliano.
     For  10 months, in the 1930's, Levi was under house arrest here, required to check in twice a day with the local mayor's office or Fascist representative.   These same people were also in exile in their own land: lost and forgotten be a remote government in Rome, and a prosperous but remote northern industrial Italy.   In 1936, when his exile was lifted, he left for France, but chose to return to Italy in 1943 when he was a wanted man.  He hid out in a friend's apartment in Florence where he wrote the book that became a classic.
      A doctor, Levi was sought out by local peasants who needed medical attention.  In time, he became the go-to health expert serving a wide community of agricultural folks bound to this unforgiving landscape where superstition and spirits substituted for knowledge and individual responsibility.  He compared the Fascists in Rome to the peasants of the South, pointing out their similarities: the Romans believing in the all powerful State and worshiping the absolutism of the state; and the peasants who lived " outside of time" in an animal-like collectivity, immersed in tribal rites and believing in witches.
      It has been 70 years since the book's publication, but it still matters.  As Italo Calvino remarked," A classic is a work which persists as background noise even when a present that is completely incompatible with it, holds sway."
     The world has changed in 70 years, but irrational thinking persists across the human landscape.  As Levi noted, this irrationality must be confronted, recognized in each of us, but be vigilant against it.