Word: gagliano
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...summer day in 1935, in the little village of Gagliano, Fascist guards took the handcuffs off bullheaded Painter Carlo Levi's wrists and drove away. Levi's crime was anti-Fascist opinions. His sentence: three years' exile in southern Italy's barren, unhealthy province of Lucania...
...peasants of Gagliano crowded around the exile with friendly curiosity, helped him find lodgings, shook their heads sympathetically. They pitied him for being out of civilized circulation; they and their forebears had lived thus for untold centuries-since the legendary days when Prince Aeneas and his Trojan followers founded the Roman race. "We're not Christians," the peasants gravely told Painter Levi; "Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli"-the point at which the highway leaves the blue Gulf of Taranto and loses itself in Lucania's arid wastes...
Painter Levi spent only one year in Gagliano, because he was one of the political prisoners to whom the triumphant Fascists granted amnesty after the fall of Addis Ababba. Christ Stopped at Eboli, a best-seller in Italy, is Levi's account of this year of exile. It is another instance of an able, discerning painter taking up a pen and thereby putting professional writers in the shade...
Pigs & Guardian Angels. Exile Levi was not permitted by the local authorities to go beyond the village limits, to stay out after curfew, to speak to the few other political prisoners. But his sharp, painter's eye missed little in the shady, shadowy life of Gagliano...
Promised Land of Gold Fillings. Not Rome or Naples but New York, says Levi, was the capital city of these poverty-stricken Italians, who lived on an unvarying diet of black bread, garlic, olives, peppers, tomatoes. In 1935, while 1,200 Gaglianoese lived in Gagliano, 2,000 were living in New York. America was simultaneously the Promised Land and a steel-and-concrete hell; it was the prison house of cruel labor from which came marvelous scissors, razors, blue-bladed axes and dollar bills-the rich wasteland into which Gagliano's sons and husbands often disappeared without a trace...