Carlo Levi was a young doctor when, for being an anti-fascist activist, he was exiled by Mussolini’s government to the poorest region of Italy, the remote southern Gulf of Taranto. Writing in his memoir, Christ Stopped at Eboli, during his exile of 1935-36, he says: “The summer was at its dreary pinnacle; the sun seemed to have come to a stop straight overhead and the clayey land was split by the burning heat.
“A continual wind dried up men’s bodies and the days went by monotonously under the pitiless light until sunset and the cool of the evening. I sat in the kitchen gazing at the random flight of the flies, the only token of life in the motionless silence of the dog days.”
Strings of figs were hanging from the balcony railing “black with flies that were sucking the last moisture from them before the blazing sun dried them out altogether”.
A bell tolls. He walks to the cemetery, to an empty grave. “I had made it my custom on these hot days when I came up here to lower myself into it and lie down. The earth was smooth and dry, and the sun had not burned it. I could see nothing but a rectangle of clear sky, crossed occasionally by a wandering white cloud; not a single sound reached my ears. In this freedom and solitude I spent many hours.”
