Museo Carlo Levi

The Museo Carlo Levi is housed in the building where the writer and painter lived during his 1935-36 confinement in Aliano, and it preserves a number of his paintings alongside documents and photographs from his time in Basilicata. The exhibition is modest in scale but moving in context: standing in these rooms, it is easy to understand the isolation and the odd beauty that Levi found here, far from Turin and the political turbulence of Fascist Italy.

Levi's paintings — vivid, slightly expressionist, full of the faces and landscapes of southern Italy — are the unexpected highlight. He was a serious painter as well as a writer, and the pictures he made during and after his exile form a distinct body of work. The most famous of them, "Lucania '61", a monumental canvas depicting the peasant world he had witnessed, is elsewhere, but the museum provides context for understanding what he saw and how he rendered it.

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A story
Carlo Levi was a doctor, painter, and intellectual from Turin who was exiled to Aliano in 1935 by Mussolini's government for his anti-Fascist activities. He spent a year here, working as a physician in the village despite not being officially permitted to practice. The experience became the raw material for "Christ Stopped at Eboli" (1945), one of the great accounts of southern Italian poverty and isolation.