Carlo Levi (1902–1975)
Author of Christ Stopped at Eboli
About the Author
Carlo Levi was born in Turin, Italy, on November 29, 1902, one of the children of Ercole and Annetta (Treves) Levi. Levi's father was a merchant who also enjoyed painting, and Carlo Levi himself became well-known for his landscapes, still lifes, and portraits. Levi valued his artistry at least as show more much as his writing, and his paintings have retained their value. Levi originally pursued a career in medicine, receiving an M.D. degree in 1924 from the University of Turin. He painted and performed medical research, but he also became involved in anti-Fascist activities in opposition to Benito Mussolini's government, and he was jailed repeatedly during the 1930s and 1940s. His imprisonment in the malaria-stricken southern Italian town of Gagliano greatly influenced Levi's later life. While treating the impoverished and ill citizens, he felt extreme pity, and the time spent in Gagliano led to his most famous work, Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945). This literary work won the Arianna Mondadori del Corniere Lombardo Prize. Levi also published the political/philosophical Of Fear and Freedom (1948), along with the novel The Watch (1948); and several authentic travel books on the cultures of the Soviet Union, Germany, Sardinia, and Sicily. Carlo Levi's frequent depiction of owls would become his artistic symbol. He died in Rome on Jan. 4, 1975. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Carl Van Vechten
Works by Carlo Levi
Miedo a la libertad 3 copies
La strana idea di battersi per la libertà : Dai giornali della Liberazione (1944-1946) (2005) 2 copies, 1 review
Cristos s-a oprit la Eboli 1 copy
Krisztus megállott Ebolinál 1 copy
Due racconti etnei 1 copy
Contadini e Luigini 1 copy
ארץ שכוחת אל : קורות שנה אחת 1 copy
Renato Guttuso. 1939-1969 1 copy
In Lucania con Carlo Levi 1 copy
Lettere e disegni, 1922-1936 1 copy
Levi Carlo 1 copy
Associated Works
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759) — Preface, some editions — 8,567 copies, 125 reviews
Natale raccontato da ... — Contributor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Levi, Carlo
- Birthdate
- 1902-11-29
- Date of death
- 1975-01-04
- Gender
- male
- Education
- University of Turin
- Occupations
- physician
politician
painter
journalist - Organizations
- Italian Senate
Italian Communist Party
Giustizia e Libertà - Relationships
- Segre Giorgi, Giuliana (cousin)
- Short biography
- Carlo Levi was born to a prosperous Italian-Jewish family in Turin. Although he earned a medical degree from the University of Turin, he never practiced medicine. He served as an assistant to a professor at Turin University's clinic while painting and writing. He went to live and study in Paris, where he mingled with many notable artists. Back in Italy, he helped found the anti-fascist Giustizia e Libertà movement and directed the underground publication Lotta politica. In 1935-1936, Levi was forced by Mussolini's government into internal exile southern province of Lucania. Out of this experience he wrote his first book, Christ Stopped at Eboli, published in 1945. He was elected to the Italian Senate in 1963 and served on the Communist ticket for two terms.
- Nationality
- Italy
- Birthplace
- Turin, Italy
- Places of residence
- Turin, Italy
Paris, France
Rome, Italy - Place of death
- Rome, Italy
- Burial location
- Aliano
- Associated Place (for map)
- Italy
Members
Reviews
Christ Stopped at Eboli is a slightish, but high-quality work. Levi is a consummate writer, equally deft at capturing a scene, or analysing what produced it. The book provides an excellent protrait - not just intentionally of pre-war rural Italy, but also unintentionally of the intellectual and cultural underpinnings colouring said portrait. It's nice finding a cultural artefact so pleasant to digest.
Idealistic painter and one-time medical student, Carlo Levi, is packed off to exile in the show more barrens of Southern Italy for his anti-fascist leanings. The year he spends in Gagliano (in actuality the village Aliano) gives the somewhat privileged northerner a view into the teeming south he would otherwise not have had.
This is not a novel - there is no narrative as such and even Levi himself does not grow and change overmuch through the book's course. Chapters take place chronologically, but could mostly stand-alone as sharply-observed vignettes, detailing the foibles, hopes, superstitions and happenings in the small village. This languid pace and the effort Levi goes to show the changeless ritual of life in the village was a little bit of a struggle for me at times (caveat: I have a four month old baby; my tolerances are not what they usually are!), however the writing is so fine it's not really a chore.
Levi writes - mostly - with a kind of detached, gentle and affectionate tone. His characterisations seem torn almost from the pages of a commedia del arte, or The Decameron. The scheming spinster, doddering doctor, wanton housekeeper etc. But Levi largely refrains from judging his cast too harshly, and their own stories, rendered quickly and with a marksman's accuracy, add a pleasant variety to doings.
This is juxtaposed with his sharp social critique and analysis. The gentle tone quickly evaporates when confronted with the grinding poverty and pervasive malaria of the region. With a sociologist's eye, Levi quickly teases out the individual threads that make up the tapestry of the south, and his analysis is often impassioned, angry, also political, ambitious and emotional. This contrast provides the book with some much needed light and shade, and also its most intriguing aspects.
For all his solidarity with his comrades in the South, Levi cannot escape his essential "northern-ness", and it informs his opinions and impressions much more than he's aware. Students of Italian history will recognise this fundamental dichotomy in the nation's character and demographics, but it was very interesting for me to see it play out in a primary source.
Levi's characterisations of the peasants, though compassionate, are frequently well-rendered Northern stereotypes. The peasants - far more so than the gentry he largely despises - are most often a plurality or mass. They are superstitious, venal, atavistic, naive, despairing and - it's somewhat implied - incapable of better. They have adopted the characteristics of their environment: fierce, hot, harsh, barren, short-lived etc.
Levi cannot escape this, but at the same time, he also recognises peasants as individuals, and maintains that they're incapable of better in the current Italy, because they exist outside and beyond it - or beyond its conception and rule by the country's Northerners. These twinning strands give the book a fascinating undercurrent of tension and anyone interested in Italy will probably feel the same.
So whilst in some respect, Christ Stopped At Eboli is a simple book that offers simple pleasures, there's more to be had in its limpid prose and dry, almost-jovial anecdotes. show less
Idealistic painter and one-time medical student, Carlo Levi, is packed off to exile in the show more barrens of Southern Italy for his anti-fascist leanings. The year he spends in Gagliano (in actuality the village Aliano) gives the somewhat privileged northerner a view into the teeming south he would otherwise not have had.
This is not a novel - there is no narrative as such and even Levi himself does not grow and change overmuch through the book's course. Chapters take place chronologically, but could mostly stand-alone as sharply-observed vignettes, detailing the foibles, hopes, superstitions and happenings in the small village. This languid pace and the effort Levi goes to show the changeless ritual of life in the village was a little bit of a struggle for me at times (caveat: I have a four month old baby; my tolerances are not what they usually are!), however the writing is so fine it's not really a chore.
Levi writes - mostly - with a kind of detached, gentle and affectionate tone. His characterisations seem torn almost from the pages of a commedia del arte, or The Decameron. The scheming spinster, doddering doctor, wanton housekeeper etc. But Levi largely refrains from judging his cast too harshly, and their own stories, rendered quickly and with a marksman's accuracy, add a pleasant variety to doings.
This is juxtaposed with his sharp social critique and analysis. The gentle tone quickly evaporates when confronted with the grinding poverty and pervasive malaria of the region. With a sociologist's eye, Levi quickly teases out the individual threads that make up the tapestry of the south, and his analysis is often impassioned, angry, also political, ambitious and emotional. This contrast provides the book with some much needed light and shade, and also its most intriguing aspects.
For all his solidarity with his comrades in the South, Levi cannot escape his essential "northern-ness", and it informs his opinions and impressions much more than he's aware. Students of Italian history will recognise this fundamental dichotomy in the nation's character and demographics, but it was very interesting for me to see it play out in a primary source.
Levi's characterisations of the peasants, though compassionate, are frequently well-rendered Northern stereotypes. The peasants - far more so than the gentry he largely despises - are most often a plurality or mass. They are superstitious, venal, atavistic, naive, despairing and - it's somewhat implied - incapable of better. They have adopted the characteristics of their environment: fierce, hot, harsh, barren, short-lived etc.
Levi cannot escape this, but at the same time, he also recognises peasants as individuals, and maintains that they're incapable of better in the current Italy, because they exist outside and beyond it - or beyond its conception and rule by the country's Northerners. These twinning strands give the book a fascinating undercurrent of tension and anyone interested in Italy will probably feel the same.
So whilst in some respect, Christ Stopped At Eboli is a simple book that offers simple pleasures, there's more to be had in its limpid prose and dry, almost-jovial anecdotes. show less
The painter Carlo Levi was one of the thousands of anti-fascists subjected to a period of confino — a kind of preventive internal exile in a remote village or island — under Mussolini. He was sent to the barren southern region of Lucania (Basilicata) early in 1935 and spent a year living in the villages of Grassano and Aliano (disguised as "Gagliano" in the book) before being released in a general amnesty in summer 1936. Later on, during the war, he wrote this account of his experiences show more in the south, and it was published to huge acclaim shortly after the liberation in 1945.
The slightly puzzling title turns out to be a characteristic local saying, implying that civilisation never reached their region, and Levi sets out to show us the truth behind that hyperbole. The peasants he meets live in appallingly bad conditions: there's nowhere near enough good land to feed them, deforestation and malaria make working the land difficult and unproductive, and the economy runs largely on the savings of those American emigrants who return home and buy a piece of barren desert. The peasants have no interest in the State, and the State seems to have no interest in them except when collecting taxes; everything is run by and for the "signori", the rump of dim-witted self-serving priests, teachers, lawyers, doctors, shopkeepers and public officials who were not bright and ambitious enough to get away to America or to the cities. Fascism is largely irrelevant: in that part of Italy the people who took it up are mostly the ones who were already running things anyway.
Levi writes with love, humour and affection about the peasants and their traditions and the things they have to put up with; he doesn't do much to hide his contempt for people like the schoolteacher and Fascist mayor Don Luigino, who spends his days smoking and gossiping on the school balcony and lets the children leave the school as illiterate as they came into it. He tells us very clearly that in his view the "problem of the south" is not one to be solved from Rome, or even from Naples, but by giving the people at the rough end of that problem a proper voice in saying what they need.
The villagers are excited about Levi's arrival, not because he's a well-known painter, but because he's a doctor, and the two doctors practicing in the village are both considered incompetent, one of them clearly senile. This is embarrassing for Levi, as he's never practiced since leaving medical school, and he doesn't want to make trouble in the village, but the need is evidently so pressing that he can't avoid the queue of sick people outside his door. Fortunately, he's able to get permission for his sister (also a doctor) to bring down a trunk full of medical gear and books on malaria.
As with George Orwell's books about England in the thirties, I had to keep stopping and reminding myself that this is someone of the same generation as my grandparents, writing about Europe in a time that's still just about within living memory. And that he's addressing people living a short train-ride away from the places he's talking about who clearly haven't got a clue how "the other half lives" in their own country.
A painful book, but also a very beautifully observed one. show less
The slightly puzzling title turns out to be a characteristic local saying, implying that civilisation never reached their region, and Levi sets out to show us the truth behind that hyperbole. The peasants he meets live in appallingly bad conditions: there's nowhere near enough good land to feed them, deforestation and malaria make working the land difficult and unproductive, and the economy runs largely on the savings of those American emigrants who return home and buy a piece of barren desert. The peasants have no interest in the State, and the State seems to have no interest in them except when collecting taxes; everything is run by and for the "signori", the rump of dim-witted self-serving priests, teachers, lawyers, doctors, shopkeepers and public officials who were not bright and ambitious enough to get away to America or to the cities. Fascism is largely irrelevant: in that part of Italy the people who took it up are mostly the ones who were already running things anyway.
Levi writes with love, humour and affection about the peasants and their traditions and the things they have to put up with; he doesn't do much to hide his contempt for people like the schoolteacher and Fascist mayor Don Luigino, who spends his days smoking and gossiping on the school balcony and lets the children leave the school as illiterate as they came into it. He tells us very clearly that in his view the "problem of the south" is not one to be solved from Rome, or even from Naples, but by giving the people at the rough end of that problem a proper voice in saying what they need.
The villagers are excited about Levi's arrival, not because he's a well-known painter, but because he's a doctor, and the two doctors practicing in the village are both considered incompetent, one of them clearly senile. This is embarrassing for Levi, as he's never practiced since leaving medical school, and he doesn't want to make trouble in the village, but the need is evidently so pressing that he can't avoid the queue of sick people outside his door. Fortunately, he's able to get permission for his sister (also a doctor) to bring down a trunk full of medical gear and books on malaria.
As with George Orwell's books about England in the thirties, I had to keep stopping and reminding myself that this is someone of the same generation as my grandparents, writing about Europe in a time that's still just about within living memory. And that he's addressing people living a short train-ride away from the places he's talking about who clearly haven't got a clue how "the other half lives" in their own country.
A painful book, but also a very beautifully observed one. show less
Painter Carlo Levi spent a year in internal exile in Gagliano, Southern Italy, in 1935/6 and this is an account of his time there. Gagliano’s real name is Aliano.
Carlo Levi was born in 1902, a native of Turin, highly educated, sophisticated and with a medical degree. By 1935 he was already a talented painter and had lived for several years in Paris, continuing medical research there. But he was also political and in 1931 he joined the anti-fascist movement. These were dangerous times for show more outspoken critics of Mussolini and Levi was arrested in 1934, and subsequently exiled to Grassano and then Gagliano.
Carlo Levi himself felt completely foreign in this remote corner of the country, and he was writing about an area and a people with whom he had nothing in common. He describes the simplest things with amazing clarity and richness of language.
Families in Gagliano lived in one room which served as kitchen and bedroom. There was one large bed for everyone and underneath were the barnyard animals including pigs and chickens. No running water, no electricity and little food. Malaria was rife and the tax collector took whatever he could from them.
However, their plight wasn't helped by the local officials and middle-classes who regarded the peasants as little more than animals either. It’s hard to tell who was worse between the petty and vindictive local officials or the priests, with their piousness untroubled by their squalid affairs and numerous illegitimate children while, just like the taxman, always complaining about the missing tithes from the peasants. Neither God nor man did anything for these people. In 1935 Gagliano had only 1,200 residents but there were a further 2,000 men from the town in America. The town was largely populated by abandoned women, along with their illegitimate children that they had with the few men that remained behind. By 1935 it had been 64 years since the unification of Italy was completed and if anything life had gone backwards for Gagliano.
In a burst of fascist jubilation on the back of the capture of Addis Ababa during Mussolini's attempted empire building in Ethiopia, Carlo Levi was pardoned but in 1943 was imprisoned in Florence. He wrote this book whilst in that city.
In spite of the subject matter, this is not a depressing book at all. For someone like me who enjoys reading about social history, it’s a fascinating study of people in difficult circumstances and how they adapt and manage. There are moments of gentle humour dotted throughout the book. There are certain similarities with the writing style to Thomas Hardy, whose novels were mostly about the peasantry of rural 'Wessex' here. This book isn't comfortable reading by any stretch of the imagination but I found it a powerfully evocative read, all the more so because it was Levi's first book, and as such deserves to be on the 1001 list. show less
Carlo Levi was born in 1902, a native of Turin, highly educated, sophisticated and with a medical degree. By 1935 he was already a talented painter and had lived for several years in Paris, continuing medical research there. But he was also political and in 1931 he joined the anti-fascist movement. These were dangerous times for show more outspoken critics of Mussolini and Levi was arrested in 1934, and subsequently exiled to Grassano and then Gagliano.
Carlo Levi himself felt completely foreign in this remote corner of the country, and he was writing about an area and a people with whom he had nothing in common. He describes the simplest things with amazing clarity and richness of language.
Families in Gagliano lived in one room which served as kitchen and bedroom. There was one large bed for everyone and underneath were the barnyard animals including pigs and chickens. No running water, no electricity and little food. Malaria was rife and the tax collector took whatever he could from them.
However, their plight wasn't helped by the local officials and middle-classes who regarded the peasants as little more than animals either. It’s hard to tell who was worse between the petty and vindictive local officials or the priests, with their piousness untroubled by their squalid affairs and numerous illegitimate children while, just like the taxman, always complaining about the missing tithes from the peasants. Neither God nor man did anything for these people. In 1935 Gagliano had only 1,200 residents but there were a further 2,000 men from the town in America. The town was largely populated by abandoned women, along with their illegitimate children that they had with the few men that remained behind. By 1935 it had been 64 years since the unification of Italy was completed and if anything life had gone backwards for Gagliano.
In a burst of fascist jubilation on the back of the capture of Addis Ababa during Mussolini's attempted empire building in Ethiopia, Carlo Levi was pardoned but in 1943 was imprisoned in Florence. He wrote this book whilst in that city.
In spite of the subject matter, this is not a depressing book at all. For someone like me who enjoys reading about social history, it’s a fascinating study of people in difficult circumstances and how they adapt and manage. There are moments of gentle humour dotted throughout the book. There are certain similarities with the writing style to Thomas Hardy, whose novels were mostly about the peasantry of rural 'Wessex' here. This book isn't comfortable reading by any stretch of the imagination but I found it a powerfully evocative read, all the more so because it was Levi's first book, and as such deserves to be on the 1001 list. show less
While on a recent trip to Matera, in the 'heel' of Italy, this book was mentioned, so got it on my return.
This is the memoir of artist, writer and doctor Carlo Levi: an opponent of Facism, he was sent in 1935 from Turin to the impoverished south as a political prisoner.
Beautiful and evocative writing, as Levi describes the scenery and people in the village of 'Gagliano' ( Agliano). The peasants are preyed upon by the State, the Church and the incompetent and self-seeking 'professionals'. show more Levi is soon called upon to use his rusty medical training (much to the disgruntlement of the local medics.) He- and his trusty dog- range as far as permitted within the enforced boundaries. There is death, humour, superstition all relayed in fabulous writing.
"Before me, like a great wave on the surface of the earth, rose the solid bare mountain of Grassano, and, poised upon its peak like a mirage, was the village. It seemed even more airy and unreal than when I had last seen it, for during my absence all the houses had been whitewashed and now they looked like a herd of timorous sheep huddled together on the yellowish-grey crest of the mountain."
While Matera, with its cave dwellings, was once "the shame of Italy", it is perhaps difficult to grasp for the 2019 visitor to what is now a Heritage Site. Now, the caves are rendered into charming houses. While Levi himself has little to do with it, his sister describes a visit en route to pay her brother a visit:
"I have never in all my life seen such a picture of poverty....children sitting on the doorsteps, in the dirt, while the sun beat down on them, their eyes half-closed and their eyelids red and swollen; flies crawled across the lids...and they seemed not even to feel them. They had trachoma." Lice, starvation, malaria and dysentery abound..."as if I were in a city stricken with the plague". Children shout out to her, not for sweets but quinine.
The title of the book comes from the peasants' belief that they are beyond the pales of Christianity... Christ stopped short at the more favoured town of Eboli. "We're not Christians, we're not human beings; we're not thought of as men but simply as beasts, beasts of burden, or even less than beasts, mere creatures of the wild."
Glad I read it. show less
This is the memoir of artist, writer and doctor Carlo Levi: an opponent of Facism, he was sent in 1935 from Turin to the impoverished south as a political prisoner.
Beautiful and evocative writing, as Levi describes the scenery and people in the village of 'Gagliano' ( Agliano). The peasants are preyed upon by the State, the Church and the incompetent and self-seeking 'professionals'. show more Levi is soon called upon to use his rusty medical training (much to the disgruntlement of the local medics.) He- and his trusty dog- range as far as permitted within the enforced boundaries. There is death, humour, superstition all relayed in fabulous writing.
"Before me, like a great wave on the surface of the earth, rose the solid bare mountain of Grassano, and, poised upon its peak like a mirage, was the village. It seemed even more airy and unreal than when I had last seen it, for during my absence all the houses had been whitewashed and now they looked like a herd of timorous sheep huddled together on the yellowish-grey crest of the mountain."
While Matera, with its cave dwellings, was once "the shame of Italy", it is perhaps difficult to grasp for the 2019 visitor to what is now a Heritage Site. Now, the caves are rendered into charming houses. While Levi himself has little to do with it, his sister describes a visit en route to pay her brother a visit:
"I have never in all my life seen such a picture of poverty....children sitting on the doorsteps, in the dirt, while the sun beat down on them, their eyes half-closed and their eyelids red and swollen; flies crawled across the lids...and they seemed not even to feel them. They had trachoma." Lice, starvation, malaria and dysentery abound..."as if I were in a city stricken with the plague". Children shout out to her, not for sweets but quinine.
The title of the book comes from the peasants' belief that they are beyond the pales of Christianity... Christ stopped short at the more favoured town of Eboli. "We're not Christians, we're not human beings; we're not thought of as men but simply as beasts, beasts of burden, or even less than beasts, mere creatures of the wild."
Glad I read it. show less
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