Retracing Carlo Levi’s experience in Aliano, Basilicata

Amy K. Rosenthal

In November 2019, a two-day workshop and conference took place in the remote hilltop town of Aliano, located in the province of Matera, which was designated as the European Capital of Culture in 2019 together with Plovdiv, Bulgaria. 

Why Aliano in the Southern Italian region of Basilicata is a spot of interest is due mainly to the fact that it is synonymous with the author, journalist, painter and doctor Carlo Levi, who immortalized the town (aka Gagliano) and its inhabitants in his memoir Cristo si è fermato a Eboli [Christ Stopped at Eboli], published in 1945.
Levi’s books, paintings and life, which in and of itself reads like an adventurous novel, have been widely written about both nel bel paese and abroad, especially in the context of Italian history faculties in London and New York, which is where I was first introduced to him. In my quest to understand the historical complexities of Italy since its unification in 1861,and particularly the long-standing thorny issues of the “Southern Question,” Levi’s own experiences as an internal exile in rural Basilicata in Cristo si è fermato a Ebolioffers indispensible insights. He reveals, for example, how the Fascist regime’s capillary dependence on the southern gentry, epitomized by the village schoolteacher and mayor, Don Luigi, created an irreconcilable gulf of prepotenzaand disdain that separated this self-centered, decadent class from the Mezzogiorno’signorant but hardworking, resilient and fundamentally virtuous peasantry.

Apart from the Southern Question, my interest in Carlo Levi became heightened when I decided to pursue a Ph.D. in Contemporary European History with a thesis on the Action Party. He further gained my attention due due to my personal fascination with the impact and noteworthy contributions Italian Jews have had on Italian political and cultural life. 
Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Turin, Levi quintessentially incarnates the romantic image of the 20thcentury European cosmopolitan: highly-educated (he earned a degree in medicine from the University of Turin in 1924), worldly (he hobnobbing with intellectuals and artists in Paris and other European cities of cultural importance) and deeply engaged politically (his mother’s brother Claudio Treves was an important socialist leader in Italy). Disturbed by the rise of Fascism in Italy and understanding the fundamental danger it posed to not only Italians at large, but also to Italian Jews long before the implementation of the Racial Laws in 1938, Levi became one of its most vocal critics from its onset. 
His anti-Fascist activism led him to form Giustizia e Liberta’ with two other worldly Italian Jews Carlo and Nello Rosselli in 1929, who were later assassinated in Normandy by members of the Cagoule, the right-wing French terrorist organization that was backed by Mussolini and the Italian secret service. Though arrested numerous times for his anti-Fascist activities, Levi met a more merciful fate by being exiled to Aliano in 1935.
Following his release he moved back to Paris for two years (from 1939 to 1941) and returned to Italy in 1941 where he was again arrested in Florence and imprisoned in Murate Prison. After Benito Mussolini’s arrest in 1943, he was released and while “laying low” during the one-year German occupation of the Tuscan city penned Cristo si è fermato a Eboli.

After WWII, Levi departed for Rome where he became the editor of L’Italia Libera [Free Italy], the publication of the short-lived Action Party, a political configuration made up anti-Fascist liberal socialists and republicans who sought a middle or so-called “third way” out of Italy’s immediate post-war travails. While at the helm of L’Italia Libera, Levi’s reflections upon southern Italian life led him, for example, to believe that the Action Party’s program of decentralizing and transforming the state apparatus could be the basis for overcoming the debilitating historical circumstances of the south, he also called for the abolition of the monarchy the purging of Fascists from the state apparatus, and advocated a mixed economy and the separation of Church and State. Despite Levi and his fellow Actionists initial enthusiasm following WWII, their hopes quickly dissipated after the 1946 elections for the Constituent Assembly, which resulted in them gaining only a handful of seats. That same year Levi published Paura della libertà [Fear of Liberty] where he took to task his fellow countrymen, stating albeit in a mixture of disappointment and anger that the Italian people “were not accustomed to fighting for their rights…that they were, in essence, afraid of liberty.”

In the days leading up to my journey to Aliano last November, all these ruminations about Levi swirled in my mind. On November 27, 2019, I departed from Rome’s Termini train station for Salerno with Stanislao de Marsanich, Presidente dei Parchi Letterari. Upon exiting the train station in Salerno we found a driver sent by Aliano’s mayor Luigi De Lorenzo waiting for us. Dusk was descending as we left Salerno. I can’t remember how long the drive took to reach Aliano, but it felt like an eternity. Oh God, I thought several times, where is this place already? Eventually we did arrive and stopped in front of the Mayor’s office and found De Lorenzo, who warmly welcomed us.
Aliano by night was eerily quiet and hauntingly deserted. I was later told that there were single-digit births so far that year and this had been the trend for quite some time. In fact, most of Aliano’s inhabitants have either emigrated abroad or to larger Italian cities long, long ago. It is, in essence, a dying town. 
The next morning I ventured out to discover Aliano, but first and foremost, to seek out a local bar for a coffee. I recall passing elderly men with deep wrinkles who sat ghost-like on benches with canes at their sides. Their hard faces revealed that they were men who had toiled the fields and known hard labor as Levi had recounted. The town’s isolation was further amplified by its lack of shops apart from a bakery, a tabaccaio and another bar still unopened. Abandoned buildings abounded. Yet, what stuck me the most was finally viewing the terrain below Aliano: hills, tumbleweeds, trees and rock-like formations. Mind you, I’ve never been to Mars, but glazing down it seemed like another planet. Cosmopolitan Levi lived here, I thought, as I wondered how surreal the town must have appeared to him during his stay there in the 1930s. 
By the time the inaugural session began in the town’s auditorium, more and more people materialized and Aliano was abuzz with people. Mayors from neighboring towns and functionaries of the Basilicata region, as well as prominent figures of Matera 2019 and the Parchi Letterari filled the seats, along with journalists, artists and local schoolchildren. After many interesting salutes and discussion, the Mayor of Aliano De Lorenzo conferred a plague of honorary citizenship to Rome’s Jewish community, which I accepted on their behalf in the presence of Carlo Levi’s nephew Stefano Levi Della Torre. 
Following the workshop, we all went to enjoy traditional Lucania dishes and listen to musicians play traditional tunes at the Museum of the American abstract expressionist artist Paul Russotto, whose mother Margherita Sarli was born in Aliano. His only son crossed the ocean from New York and was also in attendance (alas the good old days before Covid-19 and travel was possible). Later that afternoon we returned to the auditorium for a historical overview about the places that were a source of inspiration for Levi’s Cristo si è fermato a Eboli. Later we viewed a captivating film on Levi’s life, which was produced by two young filmmakers Rosanna d’Aloisio and Stefano Migliore. 

The morning of the second day included an entertaining talk about Carlo Levi with Roberto Giacobbo, the host of the popular television program Freedom. He took us on a walking tour that included the Historical Museum Carlo Levi that holds many of his paintings and the Carlo Levi House Museum, which is exactly the same as Levi left it in 1936. Giacobbo gave a heartfelt account on how Levi’s book left an impression on him as a young schoolboy and how we can never forget Fascism and the importance of democracy and being “free men.” 
Actor Erminio Truncellito later headed another walking tour throughout Aliano where he passionately performed excerpts penned by Levi in Cristo si è fermato a Eboli. His live reading left us spectators feeling like we had been thrown back in time and literally seeing those places through Levi’s eyes. The last event was devoted to poetry and music, which included the participation again of Truncellito and other phenomenal actors and writer/poet Franco Arminio.
The evening concluded with food and drink and talk of art, poetry and books into the wee hours. Looking up at the sky, the bright moon that evening seemed to have a face. I’d like to think that that man in the moon was Carlo Levi, who was smiling down on the town for memorializing him as he did Aliano in Cristo si è fermato a Eboli.

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