25 Jan 2017

Carlo Levi: intellectual engaged between writing and painting

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Where and when

25January 2017

Orario

17:30

Museo Novecento

Free admission subject to availability

Filippo Benfante dialogues with Nicola Coccia

On the occasion of the Memorial Day, the Museum offers an in-depth study on the figure of Carlo Levi, protagonist of the Florentine Resistance. The conference is part of the Shoah of Art, a project organized by ECAD and created to emphasize the Shoah in the artistic life of the country, enhancing, within public and private collections, works and artists that during the Nazi-fascism were marginalized and persecuted.

In the middle of the cemetery there was a pit, a few meters deep, with the walls neatly cut into the dry earth ready for the next dead. A ladder made it possible for me to enter and climb up without difficulty. In those hot days I got into the habit of going down into the pit and lying on the bottom … In that solitude, in that freedom, I spent hours.

So writes Carlo Levi in ​​Christ stopped at Eboli. The cemetery is that of Aliano, in the province of Matera, where Fascism confined the Turin intellectual in 1935. Here, in a corner, he stopped to paint, guarded by a guard who never lost sight of him and it is here that Carlo Levi was buried after his death in January 1975. The conference will be an opportunity to retrace the years of confinement, and those spent in Florence, where in 1943 Carlo Levi began to write Christ stopped at Eboli. The Turin painter and writer had actually settled in the city since the spring of 1941, to reside there until the summer of 1945. Four little-known years that we will try to retrace, reconstructing the circumstances in which the choice of his move matured, his activities and his frequentations during the war, his role in the Florentine Action Party and within the Tuscan Committee of National Liberation, the work carried out as director of the “Nazione del Popolo”.

Filippo Benfante received his doctorate in History at the European University Institute in 2003 with a thesis entitled Carlo Levi in ​​Florence and the Florence of Carlo Levi: daily life and political militancy from the war to Liberation (1941-1945). He lives in Florence, works in publishing, as well as carrying out teaching and research activities.
Nicola Coccia, journalist, wrote L’arse argille consolerai: Carlo Levi from confinement to the Liberation of Florence through unpublished testimonies, photos and documents (Ets editions). The book won the 2016 Carlo Levi National Prize.

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