It is the last written piece left by the Turinese author, composed during his state of partial blindness. Carlo Levi was struck, at the end of 1972, by a retinal detachment that caused him temporary blindness and several eye surgeries. From this dramatic experience Quaderno a cancelli was born, published posthumously in 1979 and defined by Giovanni Russo as “Carlo Levi’s secret book”. It is, indeed, a sort of autobiographical diary that expresses the author’s thoughts, fears, and ideals are expressed; Levi learned not only to accept, but to recognise the time of illness as a special and privileged time, to the point that he wrote that “the history of the world is inscribed in the illness, much better and more clearly and profoundly engraved than in the history of ideas and institutions”. The title of the book recalls its special wire frame, a kind of hinged wooden notebook with lanyards stretched between both sides, designed to guide the writer’s hand. But, almost certainly, the expression “quaderno a cancelli” (gate notebook) dates from a poem written by Rocco Scotellaro in 1952: “Questo piccolo quaderno a cancelli / l’ho scritto per te di cui non parlo / per i tuoi occhi chiusi e i tuoi capelli / di cera, il naso che non può fiutarlo”. The “quaderno a cancelli” of Tricarico’s poet recalls the primary school workbooks of a time, in which the horizontal and vertical bars turn into rails, thus losing the vertical bars and leaving only the horizontal ones, in order to guide the writing.
