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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Aflame Face. The Sicilian Days of Carlo Levi.

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The seventy-three years of Carlo Levi’s (Turin 1902-Rome 1975) arch of life reveal his extraordinary coherency as an intellectual, his political flame, and his aesthetic versatility. His life was an expressive symbiosis with painting and writing: two forms of 'saying' amalgamated as one. If his love for Lucania is distilled from his journey to the South of Italy, his 'Sicilian days', framed in the Fifties, and preserved in his novel Words are Stones, radiate a subterranean and solar Sicily inhabited by violence and by Guttuso’s palette. The absorbing dynamism of the oxymoron governs the whole: that is, a spiritual, geological, social soul of a world, the peasant one, on the threshold of disappearance.