Penguin Modern Classics: Christ Stopped At Eboli

“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 20th 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.

“One of the most poetic and penetrating first-hand accounts of the confrontation between two cultures”
The Times Literary Supplement