ABSTRACT
In 1945 the writer Carlo Levi published Cristo si è femato ad Eboli [Christ stopped at Eboli], a document in which he tells about his experience as a political exile in a little village in Lucania, Italy, during the period of fascism. He describes a “peasant civilization” almost unrelated to the modern world (Levi, 1984). The book shook the official Italian cultural world and provoked a lively debate amongst intellectuals, oscillating between nostalgia or, at least, the understanding of an ancient world, and the invitation and desire to go beyond Eboli (see Alicata, 1954, 1968; see also Rauty, 1976; Pasquinelli, 1977; Cirese, 1973; Teti, 1990a) and to leave behind a world whose values were considered archaic. Carlo Levi was able to gather, with such anthropological sensitivity and human understanding, the models and values of a crumbling world.
