Carlo Levi's Cristo Si E Fermato a Eboli: An Anthropological Assessment of Lucania (Critical Essay‪)‬

Lucania, the mountainous region wedged between Campania, Calabria and Apulia, comprises a large percentage of the hinterland of Southern Italy. Insular and remote, Lucania has infrequently attracted the interest of historians and anthropologists. The culture of the people who have inhabited this desolate land for millennia has been too neglected in historical accounts, which have focused primarily on the politico-economic forces that have struggled to dominate Southern Italy. For its own part, the indigenous population of Lucania was largely nonliterate and incapable of leaving its own written testimony of its unique culture. Today, as modern society rapidly encroaches upon older cultures throughout the world, evidence of this unknown Lucania is rapidly vanishing and it has become imperative to establish a valid account of this past before it disappears altogether. One of the few written texts offering cultural evidence of Lucania is not an anthropological treatise, but the novel Cristo si e fermato a Eboli by Carlo Levi. Despite the personal nature of Levi's account of his nine-month confinement in Aliano during 1935-36, the narrative focuses attention primarily on the world of the peasants, what the author refers to as "quell'altro mondo" (15) and "la civilta contadina" (121). In the opening two paragraphs which frame the entire work, Levi draws attention to the cultural and historical neglect that the world of the peasants has endured. He poetically renders it as outright negation by emphasizing that their world is