Cristo si è fermato a Eboli by Carlo Levi

He becomes part of the story, more and more, as peasants gather around him and trust his medical skills (rusty since he had not practiced for many years). Levi inimitably recounts the castrating of pigs and the skinning of goats, in which, at the end, the goat becomes “naked and peeled like a saint.” Levi’s gaze is never condescending or patronizing he always maintains a sober yet fascinated tone. (Carlo Levi actually did lie down inside the graves, and he describes the narrow rectangular view of the sky from six feet under.) He likes to walk to the cemetery on the heights of the town when it is extremely hot and lie down inside the cool graves. Generally he is allowed to go only a certain distance, and he is followed continually. From the beginning of his arrival, the protagonist is asked by the townspeople to heal their families, but the young doctor runs into trouble, because there are two other local doctors, both incompetent, and Levi is a political prisoner under restraint. There is only earthly sorrow, the whispers of spirits, the workings of witches with their magic, popular festivals, and fear and loathing of the church.Īs an anthropologist and sociologist, Levi describes the rituals of the people and their customs and battles, almost always lost, with the local government. There is no sense of time or redemption or heaven. In Gagliano/Aliano, the populace is pagan, according to Levi. Levi titled his book Cristo si è fermato a Eboli because, as he explains, “Christ never arrived here, nor time, nor the individual soul, nor hope, nor the tie between cause and effect, reason and history.” In other words, Christ never proceeded more south than Eboli (a city in the region of Campania, which is northwest of the region of Basilicata). Previously he had written essays about the relationship between man, the state, and the sacred however, Christ Stopped at Eboli is filled with gorgeously detailed descriptions of nature, faces of people, and movements of animals. What is surprising, first of all, is Levi’s clear literary vocation. Levi changed the name of his town, Aliano, to Gagliano, but other than such minimal changes, most of the accounts in the “novel” are true. Though called a novel, Christ Stopped at Eboli is really nonfiction. An Italian Jew, a painter with a degree in medicine, and a committed antifascist who had been arrested and sent to southern Italy (in Lucania, now called Basilicata), Levi wrote this famous book about his forced internal exile in 19.

The Italian author and painter Carlo Levi (1902–75) wrote Christ Stopped at Eboli while hiding in a room looking onto Florence’s Palazzo Pitti during the final years of World War II. Analysis of Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli

Cristo si è fermato a Eboli by Carlo Levi