Christ Stopped at Eboli - The Story of a Year

Because of his uncompromising opposition to Fascism, Carlo Levi was banished at the start of the Abyssinian War ( 1935) to a small primitive village in Lucania, a remote province of southern Italy. In this region, which remains unknown not only to tourists but also to the vast majority of Italians, Carlo Levi, a painter, doctor, and writer, lived out a memorable time. Many 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. But closed in one room, in a world apart, I am glad to travel in my memory to that other world, hedged in by custom and sorrow, cut off from 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 human being, and this almost proverbial phrase that I have so often heard them repeat may be no more than the expression of a hopeless feeling of inferiority. We're not Christians, we're not human beings