SOURCE: Raffa, Guy P. “Carlo Levi's Sacred Art of Healing.” Annali d'Italianistica 15 (1997): 203-20.

In the following essay, Raffa explores Levi's anthropological vision in light of the theories of Victor Turner and René Girard.

Written in 1935¹, the year of Carlo Levi's exile in Lucania, Charlotte Gower Chapman's Milocca: A Sicilian Village is an anthropological study of a Sicilian village based on the author's fieldwork in 1928-29.² Modeled on Robert Redfield's Tepoztlan, a Mexican Village (1930), Chapman's Milocca is the “only full-scale Italian village study in existence which was carried out before World War II” (Cronin 18). While Levi's Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (1945), despite its resistance to generic classification, was unquestionably the product of—among other things—its author's literary-artistic imagination, it also inaugurated a new direction in Italian anthropological research along the lines of Chapman's study as the nation sought to rediscover itself after the years of Fascism and the...