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.