Casa di Carlo Levi

In the old centre of Aliano stands the house where the painter, doctor and writer Carlo Levi lived under fascist confinement in 1935 and 1936. Restored and fitted with a projected-image installation that resurrects those years, the house opens the literary route dedicated to him and to the book this land inspired.

Why it matters

Few museum objects in southern Italy carry this much literary weight. Levi was sent to Aliano, under police surveillance, because he had joined the antifascist movement Giustizia e Libertà; the Comune of Aliano, which manages the site, calls the house the symbolic place of the cultural, literary and tourist route inspired by him. Out of those months came Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, published in 1945, which the municipality describes as one of the most important works of twentieth-century Italian literature and which has been translated into more than twenty languages.

The building itself was restored, in the words of the museum operator, "with discretion and with a technological approach", and the regional tourism board confirms it has been fully renovated. It is also where the village's most famous scene begins: Levi, stepping onto a balcony with a risky eighteenth-century iron railing, is almost blinded by the glare of the clays below.

What to notice

The centrepiece is a multivision installation: computer-programmed projectors mounted on the ceilings replay images taken from period photographic documents onto the white walls. Watch for the house and its vegetable garden, the dog Barone, the portrait of a woman named Giulia, the fireplaces, the calanchi badlands, rooftops, children, streets and the horizons seen from the terrace. Between these appear silhouettes the operator calls animated shadow figures — the shadow of paintbrushes, the trace of an iron bed, a kitchen table — alongside microfilms on peasant history.

The visit ends on the terrace, where three painted corners inspired by the surrounding landscape have been installed. Then step outside: the alley walls of the old quarter carry painted sentences from the book, and the house's windows repeat the view over the gullies that opens the memoir. Film fans may recognise the terrace from Rocco Papaleo's 2010 comedy Basilicata coast to coast, in which the protagonists toast Levi and his interpreter Gian Maria Volontè on this very spot.

Context and history

Carlo Levi (1902–1975), a Turin-trained doctor, painter and writer, was confined in Lucania first at Grassano and then at Aliano in 1935–36 for his antifascist activity. In the village — Gagliano, in the book, after the local pronunciation — he treated peasants, observed their poverty, and gathered the material for the memoir that made the place famous. His bond with the community proved permanent: the regional tourism board records that he asked to be buried in the little cemetery of Aliano, and his grave on Via Guglielmo Marconi remains a place of literary pilgrimage.

At the head of the Parco Letterario "Carlo Levi" sits this house, joined by the park to the Pinacoteca di Aliano, the Museo della Civiltà Contadina and Francesco Artese's artistic nativity scene — a grouping the Musei Aliano circuit turns into shared tickets and organised visits. Catherine Hardwicke's 2006 film The Nativity Story also shot in the village, and Francesco Rosi's 1979 film of the book kept the house in view for a worldwide audience.