...un inferno di superstizione, antichi rituali e una vita condotta secondo un destino sinistro.
THE INVENTION OF SOUTHERNNESS
PHOTOGRAPHIC TRAVELS AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE OTHER HALF OF ITALY
Antonella Russo & Diego Mormorio
If the eighteenth-century picturesque voyage fostered private images of southern Italy, the early-nineteenth-century dawn of the tourist industry turned traveling south in Italy into a public commodity, highlighting its exoticism and promoting its colonization. Topical southern sunny views, landscapes as photographers’ backdrops, and genre pictures of southerners, helped to inaugurate a new geography of stereotyped images: an exemplary itinerary of commonplaces that still shapes the current concept of southern Italy. A new army of foreign photographers operating in Italy— Giorgio Sommer and Alphonse Charbonnier among others— worked for the emerging “souvenir-picture industry,” bringing images of the Amalfitan and Surrentine coasts, the bay of Naples, Capri’s Blue Grotto, and smoking Vesuvius right into hotel lobbies, where they set up their shops.In the thirties, the locus of the South came to function as an isolating prison, a natural solitary confinement severing intellectuals from the rest of Italy. In 1935, the writer Carlo Levi was exiled to the South because of his antifascist political activities. In his book Christ Stopped at Eboli (published in Italy in 1945), Levi depicts a desolate Lucania: an inland territory as a cultural wall separating the local peasants from the rest of the country, while poverty and isolation hold them in a hell of superstition, ancient rituals, and a life carried out as directed by an ominous destiny.
Levi charted a South that had been ignored by the Grand Tour map and tourist itineraries, and gave representation to the day-to-day struggle of the Lucanian peasants, condemned to isolation, and to the hostility of their unyielding lands. “No one had come to this land except as an enemy, a conqueror, or a visitor devoid of understanding. The seasons pass today over the toil of the peasants, just as they did three thousand years before Christ; no message, human or divine, has reached this stubborn poverty [...] But to this shadowy land, that knows neither sin nor redemption from sin, where evil is not moral but is only the pain residing forever in earthly things, Christ did not come. Christ stopped at Eboli.” As historian Giuseppe Giarizzo notes, “Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli became the palimpsest of southern Italy’s intelligenstia.” Together with the republication in 1947 of Antonio Gramsci’s La Questione meridionale, Levi’s book helped to refuel the political debate over the necessity of a struggle for the cultural and political unification of the two separate halves of the country in post-World War II Italy, and focused attention on the desperate isolation of southern peasants, kept at the margins of the country and of history.
Opening image:
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Levi
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