[In the following review, Wood deems Christ Stopped at Eboli as a vigorous and colorful account.]

The South of Italy has long been known to tourists as a land of brigands, poverty, and excessive heat. Although the brigands may have declined somewhat in prestige during this century, lured perhaps to those American centres which felt the need of their peculiar talents, the poverty and the uncompromising climate have remained. Into this stark area, with its forbidding mountains and its wretched villages, came Dr. Carlo Levi of Turin, banished thither in 1935 for his opposition to the Abyssinian Campaign, then about to begin. On Levi, physician, philosopher, and artist, was thus imposed an existence which might well have been the despair of other men of similar parts. However, determined to make the best of the situation, the exile set out with palette and brush to capture the more interesting features of this land and its people; in addition, he lent a helping hand wherever medical aid was required, although his services in this capacity were somewhat restricted by the petty and officious interference of his village custodians.

[In Christ Stopped at Eboli] Levi is as skillful with his pen as with his brush in assisting one to experience with him the atmosphere of this remote community.

Gagliano, a village of the Province of Lucania, lies not far from the Gulf of Taranto, and is situated, needless to say, on a mountain-top. In this forsaken region the life of the peasantry has continued unchanged since the days of the Roman Empire.

The amenities of civilization have never succeeded in penetrating the uninviting mountains in company with the tax-collector. As a result, the peasants have the saying that “Christ stopped at Eboli,” that is, all that Christian civilization is supposed to stand for has been denied to them.

Dr. Levi's account of his days among these peasant folk offers a bountiful supply of colorful narrative. In a village alive with flies, goats, and children, but otherwise devoid of incident capable of attracting the average writer, Levi has probed gently but surely beneath the monotonous surface, and has unearthed the feuds, the superstitions, and the idiosyncrasies of the peasants, and has recorded them in a vigorous and fascinating narrative.

Toward the end of the book, Dr. Levi allows himself a short but enlightening commentary on the problem of the relationship between the state and the peasant; the gap between the two, and the sacrifice of the latter to “middle-class tyrants,” he holds to be the basic difficulty in finding an efficient system of government today. Where the Communist Silone, in his novel, Bread and Wine, urges the achievement of a peasant-sanctioned government, which would mean for the peasantry submission to a new species of centralized control (presumably to include Silone), Levi finds a solution of the problem in a thorough-going autonomy. He shows a respect for the independence of the individual, and it is between the opinions of such men as he, and of those who would demand the submission of that independence to the State in return for whatever benefits the communist system might offer, that Italy vacillates today.