While the people were pious in the sense that they were moral and kind, they were motivated more by beliefs in magic and mysticism than religion. The religious values of the villages Levi visited were a mixture of Catholicism and mysticism. Education was available, but as Levi stated, the mayor who taught class spent more time smoking on the balcony than educating the children. Malaria took the lives of many villagers it was merciless and rampant. The peasants simply did not trust the in-town physicians and therefore counted on Levi's medical skills instead, despite his reluctance, and his having not practiced in many years.
The two doctors in town were invariably inept. Homes were sparsely furnished the most frequent decoration consisted of an American dollar, a photo of the American president Roosevelt, or the Madonna di Viggiano displayed on their walls. Also, only one car was found in the area.
The one public toilet (and only bathroom) in the town did not have running water, and stood as a retreat for animals rather than people. The villages did not have many modern items, and those they did were not often utilized. A typical though meager diet consisted of bread, oil, crushed tomatoes, and peppers. They lacked basic goods because there were no shops in the village. The villages of Grassano and Gagliano were extremely poor. His book, Christ Stopped At Eboli, focuses on his year in the villages of the Lucania region and the people he encountered there. Despite his status as a political exile Levi was welcomed with open arms, for the people of this area were naturally gracious hosts. In 1935, Levi's anti-fascist beliefs and activism led to his banishment by Benito Mussolini's fascist government to a period of internal exile in a remote region of southern Italy. "The title of the book comes from an expression by the people of Gagliano who say of themselves, 'Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli' which means, in effect, that they feel they have been bypassed by Christianity, by morality, by history itself-that they have somehow been excluded from the full human experience." Levi explained that Eboli, a location in the region of Campania to the west near the seacoast, is where the road and railway to Basilicata branched away from the coastal north-south routes.Ĭarlo Levi was a doctor, writer and painter, a native of Turin. In the book he gives Aliano the invented name Gagliano (based on the local pronunciation of Aliano). Christ Stopped at Eboli ( Italian: Cristo si è fermato a Eboli) is a memoir by Carlo Levi, published in 1945, giving an account of his exile from 1935-1936 to Grassano and Aliano, remote towns in southern Italy, in the region of Lucania which is known today as Basilicata.
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