Carlo Levi Biography

Carlo Levi

(Turin, 1902-Rome, 1975) Italian writer and painter.With a degree in Medicine, he soon devoted himself to cultivating broader cultural interests.As a painter, he stood out for the first time in 1923, and six years later he joined the "Gruppo dei Sei" in Turin.He was one of the young people gathered around Pietro Gobetti, and later joined "Giustizia e Libertà".

He was confined to politics in 1935-1936, and later moved to Paris.From 1943 on he participated in the Resistance movement, and was director of newspapers in Florence and Rome.Later, he combined his work as a journalist and painting (in 1945 he exhibited in his own room at the Venice Biennale).In 1963 and in 1968 he was elected senator of the Republic, as an independent, on the list of communists.

His first literary work, Christ stopped at Eboli ( Cristo si è fermato a Eboli , 1945), evokes his experiences during confinement, when discover, in a passionate and lacerating way, the peasant world of southern Italy.The narrative (which served to reconsider the view of the southern world from the north) illustrates a solidly structured mythical story.Levi's realistic and neo-baroque prose confronts two contradictory ways of approaching peasant civilization: the fascination for the primitive and the false and manipulative mythologization of that scenario.The work contributed to the dissemination of the "southern question", which would be the fundamental theme of almost all his later works.

He raised in a very personal way the problem of the human presence in the world and its permanent risk of crisis, taking into account the profound reality of symbols and archetypes, which E.de Martino studied during the same years.After Paura della libertà (1946), written before the war, came L'orlogio (1950). Le parole sono pietre (1955) is also set in the South, specifically in Sicily, and the climax of the play is the unforgettable episode of Carlo Levi's visit to the mother of a murdered trade unionist, Salvatore Carnevale.

Il future à un cuore antico (1956) and La doppia notte dei tigli (1959) are dedicated to the Soviet Union and Germany, respectively.In Tutto il miele è finito (1965) he takes up the theme of the South, the island of Sardinia.The figures of the peasants and the shepherds come to the fore and become the true characters of a myth, which the author always tries to transform into rational, systematic, scientific and socialist achievements, with a prose in which, however , there are elements of great emotional intensity that reflect his fascination for primal presences.

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