Aliano

Aliano sits on a clay hill at 555 meters in the southern Matera province, above the Agri river valley and the Sauro stream. The town is surrounded by calanchi, the eroded badlands of bare clay carved by rainwater into ridges and pinnacles, the landscape that became the visual signature of Carlo Levi's exile. Levi, a Turin doctor, painter and anti-fascist, was confined here from 1935 to 1936 under Mussolini's regime.

The book he wrote afterward, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, published in 1945, gave the village the invented name Gagliano and turned the south's poverty into national literature. The title comes from a local saying: that Christ stopped short at Eboli, in Campania, and never reached this far. Levi was buried in the village cemetery at his request in 1975.

The house where he was held is now a museum, and the surrounding territory is run as a Parco Letterario. The annual Festival La Luna e i Calanchi, founded by poet Franco Arminio, fills the village every August with readings and music on the bare clay ridges.