SOURCE: Friguglietti, Mark. “Carlo Levi's Cristo si è fermato a Eboli: An Anthropological Assessment of Lucania.” Annali d'Italianistica 15 (1997): 221-36.

In the following essay, Friguglietti reads Christ Stopped at Eboli as an anthropological study and focuses on the descriptions and role of architecture in the southern Italian village.

Lucania, the mountainous region wedged between Campania, Calabria and Apulia, comprises a large percentage of the hinterland of Southern Italy. Insular and remote, Lucania has infrequently attracted the interest of historians and anthropologists. The culture of the people who have inhabited this desolate land for millennia has been too neglected in historical accounts, which have focused primarily on the politico-economic forces that have struggled to dominate Southern Italy. For its own part, the indigenous population of Lucania was largely nonliterate and incapable of leaving its own written testimony of its unique culture. Today, as modern society rapidly encroaches upon older cultures throughout...