'No message, human or divine, has reached this stubborn poverty ... to this shadowy land ... Christ did not come. Christ stopped at Eboli'
Carlo Levi, one of the twentieth-century's most incisive commentators, was exiled to a remote and barren corner of southern Italy for his opposition to Mussolini. He entered a world cut off from history and the state, hedged in by custom and sorrow, without comfort or solace, where, eternally patient, the peasants lived in an age-old stillness and in the presence of death - for Christ did stop at Eboli.
