Riletture di Carlo Levi

Autore: Marcella Marmo
In: Meridiana. 53, 2005
doi:10.1400/78421
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Abstract

Re-reading Carlo Levi
The essay offers an interpretation of Levi’s political and intellectual biography, taking account of his earlier works and of the critical literature. Today Levi attracts interest more as the antifascist, libertarian author of Paura della libertà and of L’Orologio rather than as the brilliant spokesman of Southern Italy. However, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli is the object of historic-biographical and anthropological analyses based on writing culture that see it as an ethnographic monograph. Recently the complex Levi’s world, has been popularized by the media and has captured wide attention. In such context, the description of Italy as it was (or supposed to be) in the ‘50s, before the cultural homologation produced by a devastating modernity, appears particularly relevant. Levi’s was able to bring into politics new languages and carried on in a peculiar manner the typical twentieth-century ambitions of engagés intellectuals. He deserves a new, ideology-free re-reading.