The Italian Village Where the Houses Have Eyes

Jun 21, 2021 430

BY: Federico Formica

LODOVICO ALESSANDRI REMEMBERS THE FIRST time he saw the town of Aliano, in 1994. He was “nauseated,” he says, by what seemed to him “a completely broken country,” a decaying hilltop town in a rural area in the instep of Italy’s boot. Fifty-nine years before, the Piedmontese intellectual and artist Carlo Levi had had a similar reaction: “Everything was unpleasant to me,” he wrote. In 1935, Levi was arrested when he reached the region, Basilicata (called Lucania, at the time).

He would be confined in Aliano for his anti-fascist ideas, so he can hardly be blamed for his reaction. Yet this patch of Italy and its people seduced both of them. Levi, who spent a year there, made Aliano famous with his book Christ Stopped at Eboli, an account of his exile in Aliano, which has been translated into more than 30 languages and put a spotlight on the misery of southern Italian peasants. 

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SOURCE: https://www.atlasobscura.com

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