Christ Stopped at Eboli     by Carlo Levi, Translated by F Frenaye Original title: Christo si è fermato a Eboli Original language: Italian Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux Pub. Date: 1977 Format: Paperback Dimensions: (in inches): 0.77 x 8.19 x 5.49 ISBN: 0374503168 List Price: $13.00 Buy online from Amazon.com for $11.20 Published by Penguin Pub. Date: 1982 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 253 pages List Price: £6.99 Not available for ordering

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Christ Stopped at Eboli is perhaps one of the great books of our century. Its effective, convincing humanism seeks to breed understanding and widen mental horizons. Half—anthropology and half-literature, it’s also a book that any travel writer would give up their life to have written.


As a young Turin intellectual with the courage publicly to oppose Mussolini, Levi was sent into juridical exile in a tiny village in Italy’s deep South. There, far from the centres of power and culture, he discovered a peasant world that was impoverished, exhausted and marginalised but with its own ancient roots in the local landscape and culture. In describing it he achieves a tender warmth of tone and imagery that would produce a sympathy for other kinds of lives in any reader.


Beyond being a book about a backward and forgotten region of Italy, this is an unsurpassed essay on what Levi calls ‘history outside the framework of time’. It shows how when we eat a husk of bread dipped in olive oil and salt we touch a Mediterranean experience that has existed for at least three thousand years and taste the same taste as Homer and know we stand under the same sun as he did. Similarly, in his evocative description of the landscape and the everyday life of its people Levi tried to break through the barriers of education and prejudice that separated him from these people and immerse himself and the reader in a human world that transcends its time and place.

‘Death was in the house: I loved these peasants and I was sad and humiliated by my powerlessness against it. Why, then, at the same time, did a great feeling of peace pervade me? I felt detached from every earthly thing and place, lost in a no man’s land far from time and reality. I was hidden, like a shoot under the bark of a tree, beyond the reach of man. I listened to the silence of the night and felt as if I had all of a sudden penetrated the very heart of the universe. An immense happiness, such as I had never known, swept over me with a flow of fulfillment.’ p214