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CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI
The Story of a Year by CARLO LEVI
TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY FRANCES FRENAYE
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Time Reading Program Special Edition
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TIME INCORPORATED • NEW YORK
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TIME INC. BOOK DIVISION
editor Norman P. Ross I
copy director William Jay Gold
art director Edward A. Hamilton
chief of research Beatrice T. Dobie
EDITOR, TIME READING PROGRAM Max GiSSert
ASSISTANT EDITOR Jerry Korn
researcher Ann S. Lang
designer Lore Levcnberg
publisher Jerome S Hardy
GENERAL MANAGER John A. Watters
TIME MAGAZINE
editor Roy Alexander
managing editor Otto Fuerbringer
publisher Bernhard M. Auer
cover DESIGN A nt hony Saris
Copyright 1947, by Farrar, Straus and Company, Inc.
Reprinted by arrangement with Farrar, Straus and Company, Inc.
Editors’ Preface and cover design © 1964 Time Incorporated.
All rights reserved.
Editors’ Preface
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HE MOST FASCINATING WORK
of literature to come out of Italy in the years following World
War II was created by a man who was then unknown as a
writer and, indeed, did not view himself as a literary person.
Carlo Levi, the author of Christ Stopped at Eboli, had been
trained in medicine and had won considerable acclaim as a
painter. But up to the time this extraordinary book appeared,
his only published works had been some newspaper and maga
zine articles, mostly polemics against Italy’s Fascist regime.
Christ Stopped at Eboli brought him swift acclaim. He was
hailed as one of the great literary stylists of the era, and the
book was immediately established as one of the classics of
modem Italian literature.
To anyone who has read Christ Stopped at Eboli, this en
thusiasm is not hard to understand, but it caused some con
fusion at the time. The book was modest in scope, and the
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reviewers had some difficulty conveying the nature of its special
qualities. They even had some difficulty classifying the book:
it was called a novel, a memoir, an album of sketches, a study
in sociolog)'. It is all of these in some degree. Ostensibly, it is
simply a true account of a year that the author spent in a back
ward, malaria-ridden southern Italian village, Gagliano, in the
province of Lucania. Levi had been exiled there in 1935, after
a period of imprisonment for opposing the Mussolini dictator
ship. The book ends with the author’s return to northern Italy
in 1936, after he was freed in a political amnesty.
I Levi’s stay in Gagliano was not, on the face of it, especially
eventful. The tales of brutality or persecution that we might
anticipate from an oppositionist apprehended by the police in
a modem totalitarian state are entirely lacking in this account.
Most American readers will, in fact, be surprised at the relaxed
and easygoing treatment the regime accorded one of its most
uncompromising critics. Levi was obliged to stay within fairly
narrow geographical limits while he was in Gagliano, but
otherwise there were scarcely any restrictions on him, and the
peasants, the townspeople and even the local officials and
Fascist party leaders were friendly to him. Indeed, Fascism was
not much of an issue in the town. What really set Levi apart b
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i from Gagliano’s people was not so much his anti-Fascist views
as the fact that he had any views at all, that he was a man of
some culture, with an interest in the affairs of the 20th Cen
tury. The men and women around him, by contrast, had a
mode of thinking and a style of life not much different from
:■ what it had been a hundred—or for that matter, 300—years
earlier. Levi’s portraits of these simple souls constitute the
main ingredient of his book.
Why should anyone care about the people who lived in
Gagliano in 1935? One might answer plausibly that the exist-
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ence of such poverty, illiteracy and superstition in that year
was a compelling indictment of the Fascist regime and that
the book is an effective answer to the neo-Fascist ideologies
trying to envelop the Mussolini years in a legend of national
grandeur. Levi’s testimony on the “grandeur” of those years is
certainly devastating. The people of Gagliano were utterly in
different to the appeals of Fascism, stone deaf to the bombast
of their local leaders, unconcerned about the success of Italy’s .
attack on Ethiopia that year.
But Levi is not primarily interested in proving again the
phoniness of Fascist claims, and he makes it clear that the
peasants would have felt pretty much the same about any kind
of rule from Rome. Any government would have seemed alien
to their own interests and preoccupations; they viewed the
state itself as a kind of scourge, like malaria. As Levi says:
For this reason, quite naturally, they have no conception
of a political struggle; they think of it as a personal quarrel
among the “fellows in Rome.” They were not concerned
with the views of the political prisoners who were in com
pulsory residence among them, or with the motives for
their coming. They looked at them kindly and treated
them like brothers because they too, for some inexplicable
reason, were victims of fate. During the first days of my
stay whenever I happened to meet along one of the paths
outside the village an old peasant who did not know me,
he would stop his donkey to greet me and ask in dialect:
“Who are you? Where are you going?” “Just for a walk;
I’m a political prisoner,” I would answer. “An exile? (They
always said exile instead of prisoner.) Too bad! Someone
in Rome must have had it in for you.” And he would say
no more, but smile at me in a brotherly fashion as he
prodded his mount into motion.
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z Levi himself has been described as an anarchist—from time
c? to time he has engaged in the politics of the far Left—and his
own hostility to the state certainly has some roots in his obser
vations of life in Gagliano. But he is not telling us about its
people just to argue the anarchist position. The people of
Gagliano, he makes it clear, are a very special case, and he is
writing about them precisely for that reason.
They are, we quickly perceive, the forsaken of the earth. The
-y title of the book refers to a saying among them, “Christ
stopped short of here, at Eboli,” which means, in effect, that
they have been bypassed by Christianity, by morality, by his
tory itself—that they have somehow been excluded from the
I human experience. To their hopeless lot they can bring only
one of two attitudes. The usual one is a “gloomy resignation,
alleviated by no hope of paradise, that bows their shoulders
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under the scourges of nature.” Alternating with this attitude is
a furious defiance, manifesting itself historically in irrational
(and hopeless) outbreaks of violence. The most recent erup
tion of this sort had been some outbreaks of brigandage in the
.1 mid-19th Century; these outbreaks, directed against the Ital
ian social order of that period, had been put down in 1865, but
tales of the brigand days were still common among the peas
ants. Levi actually met one survivor of that epoch, who told
him proudly how the brigands had kidnaped a wealthy land
1 owner and mailed one of his ears to his wife when she was
slow paying the ransom. Such tales were the closest the peas
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ants came to having anything like a historical tradition of their
own. Many of the men of Gagliano had fought, and some had
died, in World War I, but Levi says he never heard tales of this
experience; it was evidently viewed by the peasants as just an
other of nature’s gratuitous insults.
The extraordinary readability of the book stems from the
fact that it introduces the reader to these bypassed people of
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Gagliano as individuals, with the introductions performed by
a master of characterization. Levi’s gallery of portraits is a
1 fantastic one. There is his maid, Giulia, matter-of-factly iden
tified (by herself as well as by others) as a witch, able to cast
spells and mix love philters, even to “bring about the death of
anyone she chose by uttering terrible incantations.” There is a
forlorn, drunken village priest, half-crazy with loneliness.
There is Donna Caterina, wife of the local Fascist leader and
sister of the mayor and, inevitably, a power in the village. Her
self a mistress of intrigue, she is convinced that her husband
has been bewitched and is the lover of the druggist’s daughter,
a sinuous local beauty who, Donna Caterina is certain, plans
to poison her.
As to her husband, Donna Caterina knew how to handle
him. There was to be no scandal, no one must have the
slightest suspicion. In the privacy of their own four walls
Donna Caterina accused him every day of adultery and
murder, and forbade him access to her bed. The powerful
and feared Party leader of Gagliano lost every bit of his
arrogance as soon as he entered his own house, where in
the darting black eyes of his wife he was a hopeless repro
bate and unforgivable sinner, and he had to settle down
to a solitary sleep on a couch in the drawing room. This
sad life went on for six months until there appeared a last
chance for redemption: the war with Abyssinia. The hu
miliated sinner enrolled as a volunteer. . . .
I O There are also several “Americans” in Gagliano—a barber,
a tailor and others. These are men who have been to America
and returned, usually planning to visit just for a while and then
return to New York. But many of them have never gone back;
they squandered their savings, settled back to life in Gagliano,
and were soon indistinguishable from their neighbors. “Aloni'
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with poverty they regain their agelong patience and resigna
tion and all their former peasant habits.”
These “Americans” are in a way the sorriest of the lot, be
cause they have had a vision of the promised land. There is no
doubt about what that land is. For the people of Levi’s Ga
gliano, Rome is a hostile and alien oppressor, but New York
represents at least some faint distant vision of betterment,
and to the extent that they are religious at all, America is a
major ingredient of their faith. Levi describes a remarkable
scene that he observed in just about every bedroom.
On one side was the black, scowling face, with its large,
I inhuman eyes, of the Madonna of Viggiano; on the other
a colored print of the sparkling eyes, behind gleaming
glasses, and the hearty grin of President Roosevelt. I never II
saw other pictures or images than these: not the King nor
the Duce, nor even Garibaldi; no famous Italian of any
kind, nor any one of the appropriate saints; only Roosevelt
and the Madonna of Viggiano never failed to be present.
To see them there, one facing the other, in cheap prints,
they seemed the two faces of the power that has divided
the universe between them. But here their roles were, quite
rightly, reversed. The Madonna appeared to be a fierce,
pitiless, mysterious, ancient earth goddess, the Saturnian
mistress of this world; the President a sort of all-powerful
Zeus, the benevolent and smiling master of a higher
sphere.
Levi wrote Christ Stopped at Eboli some eight years after »y
the events he described, in 1943-1944, when he was living in
Florence as a hunted member of the Underground. Some AutLj/-
months later, in 1944-1945, he served as editor of a Resistance
newspaper, La Nazione del Popolo. Early in 1945 he went to
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Rome and edited another Resistance newspaper there. Christ
Stopped at Eboli was published that year.
After the war years, Levi wrote several other books. All of
them were well enough received to make it clear that his first
was no fluke, but none had the success or the impact of Christ
Stopped at Eboli. There are undoubtedly many reasons for
this—including the inability of the author to find another cast
of characters even remotely as interesting as the people of Ga
gliano. But there is another reason that is probably more to the
point: Christ Stopped at Eboli comes close to being a literary
masterpiece; not many authors could produce two like it.
—The Editors of Time
Chapter One
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ANY YEARS HAVE GONE
by, years of war and of what men call History. Buffeted here
and there at random I have not been able to return to my
peasants as I promised when I left them, and I do not know
when, if ever, I can keep my promise. flBut closed in one room,
in a world apart, I am glad to travel in my memory to that
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other world, hedged in by custom and sorrow, cut off from
I History and the State, eternally patient, to that land without
comfort or solace, where the peasant lives out his motionless
civilization on barren ground in remote poverty, and in the
presence of death?)
“We’re not Christians/’ they say. “Christ stopped short of
here, at Eboli.” “Christian,” in their way of speaking means
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“human being,” and this almost proverbial phrase that I have
so often heard them repeat may be no more than the expres
sion of a hopeless feeling of inferiority. We’re not Christians,
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