Christ Stopped at Eboli - Carlo Levi - 334 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Carlo Levi was an Italian writer, activist, painter and doctor.


Levi wrote the story Christ Stopped at Eboli as a memoir. The cause was his arrest as an activist and his exile to Lucania, Italy in the 1930’s. Despite the title, it’s not religious writing. The theme of the book is about the vastness of the place and the remoteness of the area. So remote in Italy that not even Christ bothered to go that far out of His way; he went no further than Eboli. It was meant to portray Levi’s loneliness, his ties cut from the civilised world and his helplessness at the situation.


The memoir is Levi’s observations of the poor peasants of Lucania, the corruption of politicians and the machinations of bureaucracy.


Toward the end, he says, “There will always be an abyss between the State and the peasants, whether the State be Fascist, Liberal, Socialist…we can bridge the abyss only when we succeed in creating a government in which the peasants feel they have some share…just as long as Rome controls our local affairs and wields the power of life and death over us we shall go on like dumb animals.”


He hopes for a government “neither Fascist, nor Communist, nor even Liberal, for all three of these are forms of the religion of the State. Instead, the individual must be made the basis of the State, not the other way around. If not, the “ill advised intentions of the State” prevent the peasants from feeling they participate and poverty and deserts result.

Teofilo Folengo - 312 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Born in a noble family of Mantua, Italy, poet Teofilo Folengo showed a genius for words and languages from a very young age.


He had a brief life at the Catholic monastic Benedictine order but left it to be with a woman. After years of poverty and writing, he again joined an abbey of San Martino delle Scale, in Sicily and in later years to Santa Croce monastery at Veneto, northern Italy in 1543. So the religious influence in his writings can be seen. Amongst many of his narrative poems in Macaronic verse - which is poetry in more than one language - the themes are mostly to do with mystic creatures. But the years at the monastery resulted in him writing rhymed octaves of the life of Christ, named L'Umanità del Figliuolo di Dio. Later he also wrote a poem upon the creation, fall and restoration of man.



Baldus (1517) is a work by Italian macaronic poet Teofilo Folengo.

Teofilo Folengo's first work, under the pseudonym Merlin Cocaio, was the macaronic narrative poem Baldo or Baldus, which narrates the adventures of a fictitious hero named Baldo. He is a descendant of French royalty and a juvenile delinquent who encounters imprisonment. He is constantly at odds with local authorities, pirates, shepherds, witches, and demons. The poem shows how his various companions - a giant, a centaur, a magician, and his best friend Cingar, a trickster all assist him in his journey and in his battles.

Image - Cingar frees Baldus from prison, scene from Teofilo Folengo's poem Baldus 

Illustration courtesy - Geschichte der Italienischen Litteratur von den altesten Zeiten bis zur Gegenwart, by Berthold Wiese and Erasmo Percopo (Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig and Vienna, 1899).