Carlo Levi and the encounter with the other in the Italian South The doctor and painter

Carlo Levi, born 1902 in Turin, in the developed northern Italy, became the writer probably by accident, thanks to exile in Lucan (now Basilicata), the poor Italian South, where he made perhaps his most famous book Christ stopped at Eboli. Travelling in full force, since he was exiled, determine his future life. The experience acquired living on the poor south and encounter with the other, but this time not some exotic other, but one that is, in fact, relatively close, within the same country, influenced the further writing of his travelouegs, such as "Le parole sono pietre" ("Words are stones"), when voluntarily visited Sicily and fourteen years later, "Tutto il miele finito" ("No more honey") on Sardinia. What interested him was the question of the South, an that is the question of marginal. His novels and travelogues are the examples of the reflections of the problem oft he centre, which is developed and educated Italian north and the peripheries, which, in turn, is a poor and uneducated Italian south, where margine does not become a new central location. Levi will therefore try to expose that other, marginal world so the rest of the Italy could change perspective towards it. As a traveler from the north country on his way back home he brought the news about what was happening in the South and, in fact, created a "cultural catalogue directed to his own environment and his own perception an literal modelling represent an interesting material to study the characteristics of national self-understanding. And that was exactly what Italy needed because the gap that separated the two of Italy within one border was huge and it was difficult to overcome. His work is characterized by a strong interest in the primitive, rural world and its charms. Time there seemed to flow quite different, by living there, he lived in a kind of opposition to "real time" and "unreal time". In his will travelogues, especially in the first "Christ Stopped at Eboli," Levi specify all the essentials of what constitutes an itinerary: a description of habits, values, behavior, attitude towards death, notions of time and space that are "part of the thematic repertoire of the history of mentalities , which can complement and contextualize the analysis of literary mediation passenger experience '. It was a fascist regime drove him to the border of civilization, so this title "Christ Stopped at Eboli" could be interpreted as the end of the world or at least the end of the world as we know it. His personal experience of prisoner and man in exile interween with the discovery of the world, which could be described as a world where people share his refugee fate and live on the margins of modern society. Levi,

a doctor, an intellectual (uomo di cultura) and an artist has seen the misery, bigotry, hunger, ignorance, disease and exploitation. He meets people who live like animals, discovers religious beliefs in the places where religion does not exist yet. He was introduced to a whole world of magic and that space seems to him unreal, so it is hard to establish any system of values. The journey turned into a journey "beyond", in an area where myths are still alive. Though he never returned to Basilicata, rural world has always represented the central theme of his political engagement, and one time during his exibition at the Venice Biennale he presented a picture that depicted their cries. Carlo Levi repeatedly warned about the issues of the South, with his travels in the peripheral areas of the country he wanted to emphasize that the things that are actually very close to coud be more exotic, that the ones far, far away - "beyond the seven seas and seven mountains." Levis yourneys, and

especially the first one, the exile, was no pleasur at all, as the word could be perceived today with the modern image of the traveller. Suites him better an old meaning of the word travail (travel). The etimology of the verb to travel leads us to the travail labor, toil mid 13th century, from old French travail suffering or painful effort, trouble. Levis goal, as a doctor, painter and writer, was to discover human nature and to collect information in the field. His research on people began in the book "Paura della Libert" ("Fear of Freedom") in which explains the concept of the masses. The masses for him are not people, not even its lowest part but a shapeless crowd seeking to express its existence. The mass is the people stopped on the prehistoric stage (or in the case of Basilicata in the preChristian stage) without awareness of themselves and unable to rise. Levi wanted us to meet different people, perhaps those less fortunate, who live in difficult conditions. He wanted to have eyes wide open and explain how they live. Communication is considered the most important and perhaps only possible, as well as the key to making history, where previously did not exist, and the pages of history of the South he started with the "history of everyday life". In the "Words are stones" he wrote: "...the language of the actual things is much clearer than the words and statistics. " Levi considered his journey from the beginning as "anthropological journeys" and felt that it was not only conscious entity moving in the physical area, but a constant quest to get to know the other. These others were invaluable correspondents with whom he lived.

Malinowsky claims that only in coexistence we can learn about the life of the other, and of course there is the moment of their willingness and readiness to show us their rituals and

customs. Encounters with the world of symbols which must be read again and again, wondering whether it is possible to really understand a different world: "How can I get to know these people here? I have to spend three years in Gagliano, an eternity. The world is completely closed. The only daily spectacle is the hatred and insidious struggle of the local gentry ... The value of his travelogue is int he fact that he manages to decentralize his look and get rid of the conditions imposed by the culture which he belongs to. He founds that unfortunate rural world valuable because "every culture forms an area of special significance, and therefore, as such, neither better nor worse than another, neither superior nor inferior" For both of his travelogues, the one in Basilicata and Sicily we can apply the phrase "exchanged a few words with everyone and not judge anyone". The bridge between Levi and impenetrable was formed by the informers, mostly women, who wanted to share with him his misery: "Women bagged me, blessed me and kissed my hands. The hope entered them, and suddenly some kind of a absolute faith in me... Women said, that they immediately saw that I am not heartless like other doctors, but a good Christian soul ... I was appalled, and ashamed, and the same time, because of their full and unmerited trust. " The way Levi lived in the South could be described as a kind of participation and observation, partly trying to catch the "natives point of view." Levi was perhaps a special case because he had not fully become part of the indigenous population, and later, when he returned in the modern world, it was no longer his world. Although he took part in the life of the peasants, he continued to watch them as people who do not belong to his cultural circle. His experience was clearly ethnographic, because he found the forms of cultural otherness by living among them others. He did not turn into "native" but he "has become part of social and cultural scenario, different from his own, as well as from indigenous and agrees to share the" social experiences that are associated with the situation on the ground. He behaves like a sensitive ethnographer and everything he learned about the people, he learned as a writer and a "subject who observes," thanks to the ethnographic method interviews. But the dialogue between him and the informers was not enough, and his approach is always approach of the writer, not of the scientist. His travel books could be read as a valuable anthropological work. Confirmation for that offers Italian anthropologist Ugo Fabietti claiming that "anthropology is closer to literature than science" and in this case Levi could be an anthropologist. Levi himslef was aware of his dual role, the writer and the

one observing the events scientifically. Carlo Levis writings have the ability to convince us in his description. Reading the descriptions of the rural life and the people on the margine, Levi arouse in the reader a kind of bonding with the text, the same one he had with that other world completely diffrent from the one he knew well. Description of Sardinia in the travelogue "Tutto il miele finito " ("No more honey") is full of contradictions, the feelings of closeness and distance, identity and otherness, that Levi always associates with a parallel reality and that reality separates from the one in the rest of Italy with which it seems to share a simultaneity. It seems that Levi continues with his thoughts on coexisting worlds, as worlds coexisted in Italy (one official, with his same type of official history and one on the margin, without his official history, but history and prehistories that exist in parallel). He says: "As the reality of a manifold, as in all things, in each of us different and coexisting distant time! The more person feels alive, more real and more complex it is present in the simultaneity of different conditions, like geological strata, the eternity of history and prehistory, when the archaic elements are removed, or completely hidden in the darkness of the subconscious, where it may seemed forgotten and completely ineffective. But erupt to the surface and become part of the poetry, life energy, a general understanding capacity, beyond the mechanical limits of social and psychological outline of everyday life. " The topic of the divieded worlds as unchanging fact was permanently present in Levi's work, strongly present today, despite the globalization process, that instead of equating further emphasizes the apparent division between "us" and "them". It seems that there is always a parallel reality that globalization cannot mend. In the texts which describe people, habits, customs, sometimes is present identification, empathy (understood as being the other), followed by observation, interpreted as an interpretation which, is based on "unity produced hermeneutically between ethnographer, who is the subject of cognition and the people being studied, which are the object of cognition. Author as an experiential entity and another entity meets this description, his experience makes a bridge between worlds, different among themselves: "For the farmers everything has a dual nature. Women - cow, man - wolf, goats - Satan - all these are fixed images, but in fact every being, every tree, every animal, every object and every word participate in this general idea of duality. The single meaning only have a reason, religion and history, but the feeling of existence, language skills and love - it's all infinitely multifold. In the life of the peasants there is no

place for reason, even in religion, nor in history. There is no place for religion because the divinity is in everything, everything is divine. The divine nature is really, and not symbolically in heaven and in animal. In Christ and in goats. Everything has natural magic. And church ceremonies have become pagan rituals, ceremonies that celebrate undifferentiated existence of things and phenomena, the existence of earthly gods, which - for the peasants are countless. Levis rational world in which govern order encounter the world of natural forces in which at first sight there is no reason, but there is recognition and acceptance that means much more than reason. At the same time "reasonable society" which Levi belonged to, entered into a period where there was nothing we could connect with the reason: the period of fascist ideology. And that, so called, "reasonable society" expelled from his world and sent into that, where apperently there is no reason and where christianity has not arrived yet. As anthropology seeks to answer the questions and problems to describe the world of the others and to be a science that explains the life of others, Carlo Levis texts are also the travel documents and literary texts, which contain a list of information that serves as a anthropological document. With field research Levi brought closer the oral history behind the border, the image of the country and translated it into a literary text. His lived experience have become "public good", the texts that were later used by many anthropologists, and for many writers, they were the point of reference. It is obvious that his texts are worthy of attention and that they are genuine. French anthropologist Michel de Certeau outlines four characteristics which indicate anthropological discourse and believes that knowledge of otherness is closely associated with the oral dimension. Based on the fact that anthropology is based on four terms, from which it developed its own discourse: verbal characteristic, atemporal, "other" and the unconscious are the phenomena that most anthropologist take into account. Orality "is something that the other possesses, and the otherfor the etnologist is the subject not writing, immerged in the oral communication. For centuries the other for anthropology has been a civilization prior to the letter. In the case of Levi oral characteristics are always present when he narrates about the Italian south, and often mentions the prehistoric moment that never leaves the human beings and remains written down int he genetic code. Even in the human faces he finds something of prehistoric, remained from the ancient times when there was no history. As if they remained intact and frozen in time: "I talked with the peasants, watched their faces and look. Small, black, round head, large eyes and thin lips -

their archaic appearance was not reminiscent of the Romans or the Greeks or the Etruscans, or the Normans, nor of any nation passed as an invader in these parts, but they had something of those ancient Italic figures. One of the repeated prehistoric elements is a blood relationship, the strongest of them all:" ... a profound sense, a sense of kinship and blood ties., a sense of unity that arouses something magical, "... There is no family, institutional, social, legal, or emotional connection. It is just, ancient and magical feeling of community. In addition to the description of community and connection among people, another interesting element is found in Levis texts, and that is a question of matriarchy: "... a sense of honor is separated from a sense of fatherhood. Here reigns matriarchy. These prehistoric, archaic elements that Levi saw during his travels were an integral part of everyday life, and he claims eternal. It seemes that they are immutable in their eternal stage and not part of the historical process. Anthropology usually study societies without history, but Levi texts follow the passage of some different time, the time of the places that exist on the margine of society and civilization. Levi believes that history within the boundaries of one state flows differently, independently of one another. The time in Basilicata never arrived, Levi says, and even if it did it is another time: "Christ really came only to Eboli, where roads and railway of Salerno leave the coast and sea, and enter the sad and desolate landscapes of Lucania. Christ never came here, there was no time, no individuality, no hope, no knowledge about the causes and consequences, there was no law or history . In the South as if history does not exist or at least it is conceived in another way,"the big" history here is not of too great importance. Levi's intention was to write a new history of the country, but is aware that this is not the history that unfolds in time, perhaps even this is not history, but mythology. Life is all fixed and takes place in the unique, eternal time, "I thought, I should write the history of the humble Italian - if at all possible to write a history of something that is not unwind in time. It should be written as a mythology, a history of something that is eternal and unchanging. This humble Italy was varied over the centuries in its black silence, as the ground on which stands, ranged, and the misery passed over it. And the eternity have passed over it, left no trace and it does not count .