“To this shadowy land, that knows neither sin nor redemption from sin, where evil is not moral but is only the pain residing forever in earthly things, Christ did not come. Christ stopped at Eboli.” Carlo Levi, “Christ Stopped at Eboli” 1945 Carlo Levi was a painter, a doctor and an anti-fascist activist. Because of his anti-fascist activities, he was arrested by Mussolini’s police and exiled to Lucania (now Basilicata) in the remote south of Italy. He used his medical training to help the impoverished peasants of the area and also painted while in this exile. The title of his book, “Christ Stopped at Eboli,” is a local saying ascribing the poverty and backwardness of the area to civilization (in this case, personified by Jesus) never having made it that far south, that it stopped at Eboli, or, as Levi put it, “The title of the book comes from an expression by the people of ‘Gagliano’ who say of themselves, 'Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli’ which means, in effect, that they feel they have been bypassed by Christianity, by morality, by history itself—that they have somehow been excluded from the full human experience.” Levi, a Jew and a socialist (after the war, he became a Communist Party member of the Italian parliament), became very attached to the local peasants, who he attended to during his 1935-1936 political exile. His book of reminiscence, published immediate after the war, brought to the rest of Italy conditions in the south. After Levi’s death in 1975, his body was returned to Aliano (Gagliano in the book), the town to which he was exiled, where he was buried. (http://kvetchlandia.tumblr.com/) undefined

More on Google