Carlo Levi and a Monumental Toilet

“After the square, the road rose to a slight elevation and then went down to another much smaller square surrounded by low houses. In the middle of this square there was a strange monument, almost as high as the houses around it and endowed by the narrowness of the place with a certain solemnity. It was a public toilet, the most modern, sumptuous, and monumental toilet that can be imagined, built of concrete, with four compartments and weatherproof overhanging roof, of the type that has only recently been put up in the big cities. On one wall stood out in huge block letters an inscription of the makers’ name, familiar to city-dwellers: ‘Renzi & Co., Turin’. What strange circumstances, what magician or fairy had borne this marvellous [sic] object through the air from the faraway and let it fall like a meteorite directly in the middle of this village square, in a land where for hundreds of miles around there was no water and no sanitary equipment of any kind? It was a by-product of the Fascist government and of the mayor, Magalone, and, judging by its size, it must have cost the yield of several years of local taxes. I looked inside: a pig was drinking the stagnant water at the bottom of one receptacle; two children were floating paper boats in another. In the course of the year I never saw it serve any other function. I saw no one enter it but pigs, dogs, chickens, and children except on the evening of a feast day in September, when a few peasants climbed up on the roof to get a better view of the fireworks. Only one person put it to the use for which it was intended, and that was myself. Even so I must confess that I did so less from necessity than on account of a certain homesickness.”

                                                                                                     -Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, pp 50-51.

In this final post on Carlo Levi, I intended to synthesize the previous two posts to fully detail the uniqueness of Levi’s work. In the first post, which compared the conversion of “space” into “place” (as per Fuentes) in both Christ Stopped at Eboli and La Guerra, the difficulties that accompany Levi in a new place that differs from everything he knows are detailed. Language, history, custom, and technology are all radically different from his native Turin even though everyone he meets would, from a top-down view, be considered Italians equally. This uncertainty and mystification influence his art. Levi’s descriptions tend towards the allegorical and symbolic as he struggles to convert an unfamiliar context into art. In the second post, the role of symbolic communication was discussed. In light of this uncertainty, Levi creates portraits that do not leave the impression of a real person. Rather, the reader is left with an impression of the subject’s character. This lack of detail reflects the fact that Levi was writing with imperfect information as he could not understand many of the people living in the village.

Recall that Levi has been exiled to this village in southern Italy for anti-fascist activity. As an enemy of the state, he had to be cautious in his observations. The book was published after the civil war which ousted Mussolini, but that does not mean that all elements of fascist sympathy were extinguished. Furthermore, a frank recollection of the period would not have been received well by a nation seeking to move forward after being on the wrong end of history. For this reason, the critique buried in the above quote is murky.  The Fascist mayor of the city and the central government in Rome are presented as being out of touch with the reality of the peasants. The bathhouse is not needed nor really appreciated. It is a temple of modernity desecrated by farm animals. Levi is critiquing in parenthesis because he has no other choice. The cultural constraints on writing about the Fascist government shape his style into one that is implicative rather than explicit.

The style of the bath house is also important for understanding Levi as a creative. Fascist architecture is among the most easily recognizable in Italy. It is massive, concrete, and futuristic. The message public works created under Mussolini seek to convey is one of aggressive progress, power, and the heralding of a future built with steel. The bath house Levi describes is this exactly. Rather coyly, he asks whether it was not some “magician or fairy” that placed this oddity where it sits. Both magic and fairy-spirits were real parts of life in southern Italy at the time. Potion making, witches, and inexplicable events are all pepper throughout Levi’s memoir. This juxtaposition of peasant customs and secular Fascist modernity is intentional. It reveals a war over what the nature of the “place” actually is in the “space” of Gagliano. Levi is curiously situated at the center of these warring realities. His paintings (see La Guerra in the first post) tend to be surreal and play on the prevailing questioning of the role of the subconscious. At the same time, he is an atheist and was studying to be a doctor. He possesses none of the peasant beliefs of his hosts, but he incorporates them into his writing as a critique of the alternate construction of the Italian place by the Fascist regime based on modernity and force.