Paura della libertà
As defined by Italo Calvino, it is the “book that must be the starting point for any discussion of Carlo Levi as a writer”… “an unusual kind of book in our literature, intended to propose the broad outlines of a conception of the world, a reinterpretation of history”. Even though it was written at the end of 1939, while the beginning of Second World War was raging and Levi was exiled in France, the book was not published until 1946. In the preface to the first edition, Levi wrote that it was “a small book, only meant to be a preface to a much larger book, that uncovers on each page what I thought was the truth of the world”. This essay, full of philosophical and psycho-analytic subjections, concludes stating that “Tomorrow is not prepared with brushes but in the hearts of men: and men who have followed their Gods to the depths of hell, yearn to return to the light and sprout, like buried seeds. From the summit of Fear, a hope is born, a light of agreement for man and things. Gods die, the human person is recreated. Can death and night overturn destiny? The war of man with himself is over, if art really shows us the future, and if we can read it on men’s faces and gestures.”
It is not a novel, but an essay written by Levi to complement a volume of black and white photographs, by János Reismann. The title, Un volto che ci somiglia, has been translated into German and published in 1959 by Belser, an editor of Stuttgart. The following year it was published in Italy by Giulio Einaudi under the title Un volto che ci somiglia: ritratto dell’Italia. The book contains photographs of well-known monuments of our country, marinas, hilltop villages, working-class districts of large cities such as Naples and Rome, as well as the faces of farmers, fishermen and children living around the monuments of the past. Accompanying these images we find Levi’s analysis of a rural and urban Italy that lives its time by making “…the past alive…” as if “…time has laid a friendly hand on everything…”, revealing the traits of Italian identity as cultural identity, as opposed to the national identity that had already been established with the liberal state and fascism.
Published in 1959, the book recounts the sensations of his post-war journey to Germany. It is named after a verse of Goethe’s Faust, which tells of the guardian of the tower that scrutinizes and sees down overnight fires and signs of massacre everywhere “durch den Linden Doppelnacht” (“for the double night of linden trees”). The cover of the first edition reads: “Carlo Levi’s countries always become ‘his own’, related to this guest in a perpetual state of grace by a relationship (as if of consanguinity or identification with an inner reality) with a lyrical, existential, rational and historical symbol. Germany is and remains for Levi, the antithesis, the other from himself. Even his cognitive solicitude would lead him to attack it from all sides, to try to incorporate it, to bring forth that which, beyond the glittering showcases of the “German economic miracle” and the shutters of the oblivion of the past, is his soul”. 
Last travel story published in 1964, that time dedicated to Sardinia. Carlo Levi visited the island two times, ten years apart, in May 1952 and December 1962. The reflections that the author transcribes in his travel diary tell of a land with its myths and archetypes, a ‘barbaric and fairytale-like’ description, as Franco Antonicelli defines it, “a Sardinia of stones and shepherds, and of modern and living men”. The author dwells on describing the daily problems of the Sardinian land, collecting the places and faces of the innermost territory, telling in particular of areas that imprinted his memory, such as Nuoro, Orgosolo and Orune. The title Tutto il miele è finito takes its cue from a Sardinian funeral song in which a mother mourns her murdered son, comparing him to the honey that is no longer there, represents a land that is not motionless and timeless, but a reality in which we feel the change of history, starting from archaic and primordial images: “Here, in the island of the Sardinians, every going is a going back”.
