Beside the Seaside

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In Which Christ Did Indeed Stop At Eboli

July 3, 2008 by Mike

Marina de Ginosa

Route: Scanzano Jonico - Aliano - Scanzano - Marina di Castellaneta - Marina de Ginosa

I may have been slightly cryptic last night when I revealed how excited I was about coming to Aliano.

Nobody in the real world should have heard of Aliano. Relatively few people in Italy should have heard of Aliano. Hell, not that many people in this region, poor Calabria, should have heard of Aliano. Or would have heard of it, had not an anti-Fascist activist, artist and qualified doctor named Carlo Levi been exiled there from his home in northern Turin, in 1935. (And to make it even less famous, he called it Gagliano in the book.)

Levi spent eight months in Aliano in 1935.

Nearly ten years later, he published a slim memoir, Christ Stopped At Eboli, recounting those days, and the encounters he had with the locals -- the bourgeoisie, the Fascists, above all the local peasants.

I cannot recommend the book highly enough. But you'll want to make this same trip having read it. (I can't recommend the trip highly enough either.)

(Eboli, by the way, is 139km away, according to Google Maps. It's taken me a couple of weeks to get from there to here, the long way round besidetheseaside, but in 1935 it was more than a lifetime away. It was, to the people of Aliano, more than a world away.

The book's title comes from the local sense that the 'Christian' world had nothing to do with Aliano. As 'christian' was also their colloquial term for 'human being', the implication was that the locals were less than human. Less, indeed, than the beasts that the 'christians' appeared to care for far more.)

[Please note: I have a heavily-annotated copy of the book. It's temporarily a few hundred miles away. I want to make several references to it here so this page will be updated in the next week or so. Charlotte -- hope you're enjoying it. Colin -- as ever -- huge thanks for buying me a copy.]

In some ways, Aliano really hasn't changed since Levi's first, enforced visit. In other ways...? Well, to drive up the Agri valley from the coast today, is to be comforted and charmed by rustic bliss and the peace and quiet of an empty landscape. It's the kind of place where I could picture living (or, if I'd been a financial success in life, buying a second home). It ticks all the boxes. But I know it was a malaria-infested, proto-animist hellhole for the people who lived here just 75 years ago.

People like Guiseppe, who I spent a happy hour talking to this afternoon, overlooking the Fosse del Bersagliere. The public toilet was a few steps away. As was the church, and the hovel where the paedophile priest lived with his 17th century manuscripts, his 90-year-old mother and a raft of chickens. The schoolroom where the Fascist mayor whipped the schoolboys (was he ever investigated..?) was within sight. And down the saddle of the hill -- the home Levi made, where Julia de San'Arcangelo made love potions.. and Guiseppe lived, as a three year old, in the one-roomed hovel next door, with his parents, his brothers and sisters, and what chickens and goats the family could afford to keep.

Beside the Seaside

In Which Christ Did Indeed Stop At Eboli

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