Word: eboli
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...EBOLI...
Exiled from Rome in 1935 by Mussolini's Fascists, Carlo Levi, poet, painter, doctor and political dissident, was sent to a mountain village in Lucania in southern Italy. The book he wrote about this experience, Christ Stopped at Eboli, has become a small modern classic. If the film, which has been carved out of a much longer mini-series originally made for Italian television, does not have quite the stature of the book, it is nonetheless sober, virtuous and quietly absorbing...
...book took its title from the last train stop before Lucania, and the last outpost of the civilization that had nurtured Levi. The implication of the title is that despite the primitive religiosity of the culture that lay beyond Eboli, even the Saviour would have stopped before entering a realm "hedged in by custom and sorrow . . . without comfort or solace." What Levi -played with patient sympathy and intelligence by Gian Maria Volonte - finds in Lucania is a drunken priest who is sometimes stoned by the village children, a bombastic mayor with the habit of summoning everyone to the town square...
...Eboli had worked in the rackets for at least 40 years, mainly in New York's Greenwich Village. Although long considered too rash for high command, he was once summoned to his native Italy to receive the personal praise of his deported boss, Lucky Luciano, for jumping into a Madison Square Garden ring and slugging the referee after one of his fighters, Rocky Castellani, was beaten. He climbed steadily in the family of Luciano's successor, Vito Genovese, partly by shooting straight. He reportedly carried out a contract in 1962 to gun down Anthony Strollo, another rising Genovese...
...Eboli nevertheless became one of three men to inherit the command of the family when Genovese died in 1969. Of the others, Gerardo Catena has since been imprisoned for refusing to answer questions from a New Jersey crime commission, and Mike Miranda is too old, at 78, to want to wield top power. Eboli's murder gives the aging Carlo Gambino effective control of the Genovese family...