The hilly landscape that surrounds Aliano is so suggestive that it is uneasy to go away without feeling a strong nostalgia. The "Genius loci" pervades the visitor and magically attracts him towards the arid expanses of the desert in search of something moving, a noise or a remote echo. Only the attentive eyes of the black kite gliding over the gorges and clay hideouts break the badlands stillness and invite the gaze to space out distant horizons and the white houses clinging on the ravine crests.
Levi “… The house where finally a few days later ... I went to live was, it can be said, the only civilian house in town... It was made up by three rooms, one in a row to the other. From the street, a side alley on the right of the main street, it was the kitchen, from the kitchen to the second bedroom, with five windows, which was my living room and my painting studio ".
From Levi's writings an empty, uninhabited house, as it is nowadays, inhospitable, almost hostile as he left it after his departure, gradually come back to life. The restoration of the house intends to make it accessible and allow a discreet and delicate intrusion but not modifying or offending what Levi observed, studied and commented on. A house somehow trivial, but with the magic that only places that have entered a great novel are enough lucky to convey.
The literary and artistic activity of Carlo Levi was very intense and intense, but his literary masterpiece now considered a classic of our literature was the "Christ stopped at Eboli", set in the imaginary town of Gagliano (Aliano) where for about a year Levi had been able to penetrate the arcane mysteries, stories, legends, magic and miseries of the southern peasants. The story is autobiographical: Levi, confined during fascism in a small town in Lucania, comes into contact with the profound misery of that dark and painful part of Italy that has been buried for millennia under the weight of injustice and political indifference.
It is the Italy of southern peasants, of a population that lives on the margins of history and for whom the message of Christ himself still seems to be far ahead. Thus it was born, from the continuous and vibrant relationship between the inner world of the Artist and the patient and very ancient world of those primitive people, a story to discover a different civilization, a relationship of love, poetry, of total identification. The ability to read the book in all its broad senses, poetic, linguistic, structural, political, social, psychological, analytical, historical, essayistic, and pictorial, brings back to the very definition of the work of art.
From the goat, to the cemetery, from the peppers to the exorcisms, from the porcelain box to the brigands to the infinite spaces of the mountains of Lucania, Levi manages to fly over the entire region, on its arid valleys, on its slow rivers, on the legends of the brigands and on the ghosts of the caves, while remaining anchored to the terrace of his house from which he could observe the rudder of the madonna of the angels "like a dead bone, the head of a gigantic femur". The correspondence between told places and real existing places is very close and very current to the point that, immersing yourself in the Lucanian environments described by Levi, you can find it hard to believe that more than after half a century they apparently haven’t gone through transformations or alterations. The current lands, horizons, men and goats have the same colors, the same shades, the same faces, the same smells, the same expressions of mystery that are found in the pages of the literary text. Today we open a window, any wooden window shattered from the interior of one of the many stone dwellings with braided iron railings scattered throughout the town; we observe the panoramas, the colors, the badlands, the valleys; they still look like the paintings inspired by the pages of the text; no human presence, no sign of life, only arid and desolate lands as far as the eye can see, extended to the horizons confused with the sky.
Levi “…This strange and steep configuration of the land makes Gagliano a kind of natural fortress, from which you can only run away out by forced walkway …” Aliano is still isolated today among the crests of his ravines and although the "paths" described by Levi have currently been paved, the impression of indisputability that is felt by observing the town from the valley gives the place a mysterious and austere ambience that stimulates curiosity and invites its gradual discovery.
Walking along the stone alleys of the historic center, you can discover those ancestral traditions that aimed to repel the evil eye through the architecture of the facades. Small windows like evil eyes underlined by eyebrows frowned by the ripple of the worm-eaten chestnut of the platbands, topped immense arches that convey to the houses the expression of a demonic grin. Access stairs that grind the teeth made of broken steps give the houses a grotesque and hideous expression that brings back to the mysterious world of monsters and mythical creatures of fantasy.
It is sufficient to wander around the small and naked historic center of the town and randomly open the bolts that lock the tattered doors of the old peasant houses to magically find yourself into the the pages of Levi.
Nothing has changed, everything is frozen and crystallized from ancient dust. The iron beds against the smoked walls seem to have been abandoned yesterday, in a hurry because the ravine was threatening them.
Levi “… And every other white clay without trees and without grass, dug by the waters in holes, in cones, squares of malignant appearance, like a lunar landscape ... and everywhere there were only precipices of white clay, on which the houses were hovering in the air ... it was a gradual succession of mounds, holes, erosion cones streaked with water, natural caves, piazzas, ditches, clay hills, as if the whole earth had died…”.
It is absolutely unique and precious that a man of culture, a sensitive artist, through his forced segregation (confinement) found himself immersed in a social reality unknown to most, which has inspired and impressed him to the point to create with his work, a chronicle masterpiece and a treatise on ethnology. The meticulous description of the faces, the valleys, the animals, the houses and the stones allows today their equally meticulous reinterpretation which will allow you to discover all their surprising integrity.Very varied landscapes alternate in this part of the region. They range from the last corner of the Matera Murgia, with a cereal vocation, to the mountains that separate the valleys of the Bradano and Basento rivers. From the hills cloaked in the wheat fields to the fruit crops that slowly slope towards the Ionian Sea. From the mountains covered with woods, to the harsh, lunar landscape of the badlands, so effectively described by Carlo Levi.
Levi metaphorically found, in the Lucanian countries, the human condition that was at the beginning of time and what needed to be looked at to create an alternative way. He wrote of his stay that: “… it was firstly experience, and painting and poetry afterward ... and then theory and joy of truth to finally become an open story…” Levi had captured the socially more dramatic aspects of this small town of 1350 inhabitants, 100 kilometers from Matera and 500 meters above sea level, where he lived for seven months and seventeen days, from 3 October 1935 to 20 May 1936, as a political exiled. He, as he later declared in the preface in the folder of lithographs "Christ stopped at Eboli" published in 1974,“Aliano is the symbol of many other Alianos scattered around the world …”.
In his electoral journey of 1919 Luigi Cucari observed that during the rallies, the upper class were always strictly separated from peasant people. This is a social rift which in Carlo Levi's analysis constitutes the third qualifying point of the southern question (Questione Meridionale), the "social side of the problem": “The real enemy, the one that prevents all freedom and every possibility of civil existence for farmers, is the petty bourgeoisie of the towns. It is a degenerate class, physically and morally: incapable of fulfilling its function, that only survives on small robberies and the bastardized tradition of a feudal right ". This is exactly the conflictual relationship of love and contempt that tied Levi to his Alianese territory during the period of confinement.
Peasants, illiterate and long excluded from the right to vote, are therefore socially and culturally completely foreign to both nobles and bourgeois. But the silence of the mountains, the solitude and misery of the villages perched on the mountains, the infinite expanses of clay, the slow and sly rivers of the Agri and Sauro valleys and still the legends of the brigands, fairies, werewolves and witches were all elements of inspiration of the author who lived them personally and deeply: treating malaria patients, painting portraits of Lucanian children, writing down his impressions on the notebook. In the words and tales of the "Christ" is outlined a curious, fascinated and sensitive Carlo Levi to everything he is surrounded by.
He deepens the analysis of places and characters with such a literary force that he himself finds himself projected towards those archaic and unknown times that sank their territorial origins in the mythical Magna Grecia. The relationship that linked him to the Lucanian land emerges from his dialogues with Giulia Santarcangiolese who, entering his home in Aliano, helped to reveal the secrets of history, places and mysteries of that land.
“ Only one (definition) is adequate for her: she is clean, she is honest, she knows how to feed, and then, the house where she lives is a bit alike her ... I therefore decided to look for her ... and she entered my new home. Giulia was a tall and shapely woman, with a thin waist like that of an amphora, between her chest and strong hips. The face was now wrinkled for years and yellow for malaria, but the signs of the ancient beauty remained in its severe structure, as in the walls of a classic temple, which has lost the marbles that adorned it …”
And from daily actions of Giulia described in detail in the book, it is possible today to reconstruct the mosaic of the intact places that had inspired the author in his exile. He had the right to walk only in the town stretch between his house and the cemetery, both of them preserved intact and rich in the same flavor shining through the reading of his passages. In this short urban stretch traveled endless times, Levi meets the sick, talks with the notables, paints the valleys that surround him, brings the peasants and their ancient culture closer together, obtaining a picture so extensive and universal between his inner world and the world of those primitive people to become a universal diffusion essay defined by Rocco Scotellaro as “The most passionate and cruel memorial of our times".”.
…At a glance the rest of the town ... behind their yellowish roofs the slope of a mountain popped out ... and beyond the sky, the void of the valley was felt. On my left, at noon ... the boundless expanse of clays, with the whitish spots of the villages, up to the borders of the invisible sea. To my right, at midnight, the landslide descended on the ravine enclosed between the mountains, which showed their bare and barren face ... In front of me, towards the west, gray figs from the garden and the roofs of the last underneath hovels on the slope, the Sierra of the Madonna of the Angels ... like a dead’s bone, the head of a gigantic femur, which still wore dried shreds of flesh and skin ... Behind this desolate bone was hidden ... Gaglianello ... and behind, more blue, others rose hills and more ... with vague villages in the distance, and further still the villages of the Albanians, on the Pollino slopes, and of the mountains of Calabria that closed the horizon. ... And all around other white clay without trees and without grass, dug by water in holes, in cones, hillsides of malignant aspect, like a lunar landscape ... and everywhere there were only precipices of white clay, on which the houses were hovering in the air. ... Invisible bestial presences manifested themselves in the air, until, behind a house, the local queen, a goat, appeared with a leap of her arched legs, and stared at me with her incomprehensible yellow eyes …“
Carlo Levi:“The house was modest, cheaply built, and not beautiful, because it had no character, it was neither noble nor peasant ... the accommodation was almost empty ... And above all it was home, a place where I could stay alone and work ... I therefore hurried to greet the widow, and to begin my new life in my definitive residence .... Happy with the new solitude, I was lying on my terrace, watching the shadow of the clouds moving on the distant ridges, like a ship on the sea ... I often stay out on sunny days, to paint: but I mainly worked at home, in the studio or on the terrace ... On my terrace the sky was immense, full of changing clouds: it seemed to me that I was on the roof of the world, or on the deck of a ship, anchored on a petrified sea …
”The sleepwalkers become wolves ... there were some in Gagliano, and they went out on winter nights, to meet their brothers ... and they all gathered together with real wolves, around the fountain. "... The old woman was a witch, and it often happened to her to converse with the souls of the dead, to meet nuns, and to entertain herself with real devils, in the cemetery ... she was a thin, clean and good-humored peasant ..." "... A night ... the old man came back to Gaglianello ... and he had felt a strange tiredness all over his body, and he had to sit down on the ground, on the step of a chapel. It had been impossible for him to get up and go on. Someone prevented it. The night was black ... but from the ravine a beastly voice called him by name. He was a devil, installed there among the dead, who forbade him to pass …”.