works
It was written in Florence between December 1943 and July 1944, during the German occupation, and published by Einaudi publishing house by September 1945. It was immediately a great success and aroused debates and reflections on the relationship between peasant civilisation and modernisation. The book represents for Italian literature one of the masterpieces and, in Carlo Levi’s life, the beginning of his writing activity.
The cover of the first edition reads: “As in a journey to the beginning of time, Cristo si è fermato ad Eboli tells the discovery of a different civilization. It is that of the peasants of Southern Italy: out of history and progressive Reason, ancient wisdom and patient pain. The book, however, is not a diary: it was written many years after the direct experience from which it originated, when real impressions no longer had the
prosastic urgency of the document [… ] the reader can find in it a reason for poetry, a world of language, a mirror of the soul, and the key to otherwise incomprehensible historical, economic, political and social problems.”
Click below to find the PDF of the entire work: READ
At the following link you will find the reading of Cristo si è fermato ad Eboli, on RAI radio, in the broadcast AD Alta Voce: LISTEN
works
“At night, in Rome, it seems you can hear lions roaring. There is an indistinct murmur, and that is the city breathing, amidst its dark domes and the distant hills, in shadow that glistens here and there; and every so often, the raucous noise of sirens, as if the sea were nearby, and ships were setting sail from the harbor for unknown horizons. And then there is that sound, both lovely and savage, cruel but not devoid of an odd sweetness, the roaring of lions, in the nocturnal desert of houses”. This is one of the most poetic passages of Carlo Levi’s second novel, L’Orologio, published in 1950. Whereas Cristo si è fermato ad Eboli accounted for a world out of time and history, L’Orologio tells a world in which all times and all histories are contemporary. Levi recounts the end of Ferruccio Parri’s Resistance Government, the beginning of the crisis of the liberal and shareholder parties, the coming to power of Alcide De Gasperi and the Christian Democrats, and, above all, Rome and Italy at that time. The book appears as a container in which the atmospheres, feelings, and enthusiasm of the immediate post-war period are mixed with the contradictory and immobility of a political class that doesn’t manage to go beyond an abstract vision of the problems.
works
It is the diary of three trips made by the author in the lands of Sicily between 1952 and 1955. With this book, a new literary vein opens up in Levi’s production (even if he had already demonstrated it in his articles published in La Stampa and L’Illustrazione italiana), that of reportage.
Le parole sono pietre, published in 1955, is a harsh account of the backwardness of Sicilian farmers “the spectacle of the most extreme peasant misery”, of a land where it becomes difficult to apply those laws that the Italian state has approved for the redistribution of land, to improve working conditions, to enforce rights that should apply to everyone, but in those lands must submit to the privileges of the powerful. The book is dense with facts that the writer transfigures by placing them in the symbol of human consciousness, where “…tears are no longer tears but words, and words are stones”: stones are the words of Francesca Serio, the mother of Salvatore Carnevale, the rebel peasant murdered by the mafia for having found, in Sciara in 1951, the section of the Partito Socialista and the Camera del lavoro; stones are those, thrown by a Sicilian mother, in the courtroom of the Tribunale di Palermo, who tells and challenges Cosa Nostra, the law of the fief and the complicity of the institutional power.
works
Second travel book by Carlo Levi, published in 1956. This time it is the journalistic account of the trip made between 17 October and 19 November 1955 in the Soviet capital, Leningrad, Kiev, Armenia and Georgia.
“Just as the inhabitants of New England have preserved the puritan ways of their homeland, or as the Canadians have preserved the french language of the 1700s, the Soviets have remained the guardians of the feelings and customs of Europe, when Europe was united, believed in a few ideal truths and had confidence in his own existence”. This is what Carlo Levi tells us in his book, a narration full of details, of descriptions of a world that is both outdated and young. The author refers to a poetic, childish image and lets himself be carried away by the description of the places and souls he meets.
