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Christ Stopped at Eboli: An Anthropology of the South

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.

CARLO LEVI, CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI, 1945¹

The intellectual nostalgia for a southern authenticity and the disappearing peasant world was combined with a contempt expressed toward that very world. The photographs examined in this chapter are subtended by this basic tension, which opposed a yearning for the simplicity and utopian purity of a preindustrial, precapitalist way of life, while rejecting and condemning it for its poverty, ignorance, and seeming lack of sophistication. Italian photographers were negotiating the difficult concept of the South, subject to endless stereotypes through photographs of miseria, illiterates, sulfur miners, poor fishermen, postwar reconstruction, and “neopagan” magic rituals. These form a disparate visual archive of the South spanning photojournalism, governmental photography, vernacular photography, photobook projects, and exhibition projects.

Humanist photography of the South can roughly be divided into three categories: (1) that which aimed to transmit a socially concerned message (often, but not exclusively, connected to a Communist perspective) about the power of the proletariat and the need to draw attention to possible social alternatives for the southern marginalized such as the poor, the ill, the widowed, and peasants; (2) anthropological photography, the aim of which was to document disappearing peasant cultures; and (3) formalist vernacular photography, which sought to represent the South in an aesthetic form, often with reference to literary precedents such as Carlo Levi’s novel Christ Stopped at Eboli, Rocco Scotellaro’s poems, Elio Vittorini’s novels, and even D. H. Lawrence’s travel books on southern Italy. The framework for Christ Stopped at Eboli, and its widespread postwar influence, can be traced back to a day in 1935, when Carlo Levi, considered a political dissident under Fascism, was arrested in his studio in Turin while illustrating the cover of a book by Mario Soldati on America.² He was sent into internal exile (al confino) to the remote mountainous area of Lucania in southern Italy where he was kept under the surveillance of the local Fascist authority (podestà) who would read his post, spy and report on his movements, and ensure he did not associate too freely with the villagers, despite the fact that they were powerless, mostly illiterate, and lived in abject poverty. He lived there for nearly a year in the village he called Gagliano in his novel, which was Aliano in reality. While in hiding during the Second World War, Levi wrote his memoirs, Christ Stopped at Eboli, first published by Einaudi in 1945. The realism of the descriptions of disenfranchised peasants with whom Levi spent time cut off from “civilization” reveal a bewitching, discomforting world of squalor and magic in which religious rituals were possibly dated to a pre-Christian era. In fact, the peasants inspired the title of the book. They told Levi: “We’re not Christians. . . . Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli”—Eboli being the last city travelers pass before reaching the region of Basilicata where Levi had been exiled.

The novel reached the height of its resonance in the 1950s, bringing a previously ignored civilization to light, at a time when the south of Italy had become a stage for the competing political forces of Communism and Christian Democracy. The novel grabbed the imagination of Italian and foreign photographers, academics, anthropologists, artists, film directors, and journalists who sought out an “exotic” world, one forgotten by Italy and the rest of the world. Anthropological discoveries made the headlines, and were part of the pioneering studies of the Marxist ethnologist Ernesto De Martino, who followed in the literary wake of Christ Stopped at Eboli and established Gramscian concepts of “progressive folklore.” His interest in the religious rituals of the peasants opened up a world previously ignored. The role of photographers in documenting the processions, rituals, and dances, which until then had only been transmitted as part of an oral and theatrical peasant tradition, reached the attention of Italians through the mass media. De Martino’s research can be considered somewhat at odds with American anthropological research that was taking place simultaneously in the South, creating an anthropological microcosm of the wider cultural Cold War.

The South became a locus for humanist thought, acquiring a new significance regarding the North-South divide and Italianità, at a time when Italians were reckoning with their nation’s shattered, self-doubting, post-Fascist state. Gramsci, who was from Sardinia (which is considered part of the South), controversially argued for national hegemony and the collaboration of the industrial North and agrarian South in an essay titled “Certain Aspects of the Southern Question” (“Alcuni temi sulla quistione meridionale”) in 1926, although the essay would only be published in 1948 by Einaudi as part of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. He had placed the southerner as protagonist in the creation of a national-popular culture and the transferal of knowledge of the elite few to the masses. Under Fascism, these ideas were seemingly part of Mussolini’s ruralist mission; in reality the regime was paternalist, disinterested, and repressive of southern peasant culture. Yet it preserved an anxiety toward its condition as proof of the unity of the nation.³ It claimed to have civilized the Sicilian latifondi, retrieving the South from its backwardness.⁴ The latifondo, a large landed estate combining a mixture of cereal crops and animal husbandry, was the traditional form of agricultural enterprise. Each latifondo was organized differently, although the hierarchy was generally composed of the latifondisti, or landlords, who leased their land to gabellotti, or middlemen who parceled it out and rented it to coloni, or small tenant farmers. These employed braccianti, or agricultural wage laborers, who were peasants and formed the lowest, poorest, and most populous rung of the farming hierarchy. The land was arid and infertile, and the peasants, who generally lived with their animals, were subject to diseases like typhoid and malaria. In a speech in Palermo in 1924, Mussolini promised to find a solution to the endemic problems of the South: “I don’t ignore the squalor of the latifondo, nor is the obscure tragedy of the sulphur mine unknown to me. But it is one thing to read, even in reports, and another to see, observe and go down amidst the people, the people who are good, sobre, tenacious, laborious.”⁵

The image of a strong South was necessary for Fascist propaganda in particular after the Allied invasion, which began on the central southern coast of Sicily. On July 22, 1943, around the time Capa shot the photograph in Troina seen in Chapter 2, Tempo published People of Sicily (Gente di Sicilia). The cover features a black-and-white portrait of a beautiful and strong peasant woman, a sort of Italian Marianne, her gaze serious and determined. The article is illustrated with photographs of a peasant family, a man and three boys (presumably father and sons) standing proud in their dungarees, white shirts, and sunhats in the full glare of the sun with the caption “The people know that bloodshed renders the earth fertile, makes faith more pure and solid, renews civilization” (Figures 3.1 and 3.2).⁶ Retrieving patriotic ideals and words from Giuseppe Mazzini and Giovanni Verga, the accompanying article recalls the unification of Italy and the need to fight the enemy as one country, an idea emphasized by the photograph of the peasants shot from below accentuating proletarian power and pride. These very different photographic attitudes toward the southern peasant (one mocking, the other elevating) show the dichotomy faced by young postwar photographers interested in documenting the potential moment of renewal of the South in the late 1940s.

FIGURE 3.1 Cover of Tempo, a. VII n. 217, July 22, 1943.

Source: Biblioteca di storia moderna e contemporanea, Rome.

FIGURE 3.2 Anon., Gente di Sicilia, Tempo, a. VII n. 217 (July 22, 1943), p. 6.

Source: Biblioteca di storia moderna e contemporanea, Rome.

After the war, many of the photographers who went South were from the North, often affiliated to camera clubs like La Bussola (Milan) or La Gondola (Venice). Their travels corresponded to a time when Italians were negotiating an image of Italianità, exemplifying a tension that underlay the stereotyped yet intangible southern identity. John Dickie has argued that the South represented that against which Italian national identity defined itself; that it was seen as “nineteenth-century patriotic culture’s most important funds of images of alterity.”⁷ And yet, in the postwar period, the South had a second “hour of glory” in which it came to symbolize the possibility of the dream of the unification becoming an actuality. Postwar photography had a central role in the quasi-utopian search for an authentic, knowledgeable representation of the South, on which the new postwar national identity depended.

A dialectical narrative emerges in Italian photography where the “concept” of the South was divided between “Us” and “Other”: it was conceived of as a primitive and “backward” society, dissociated from the rest of Italy, but also as an untapped crucible of a rich disappearing culture that had been repressed. It represented an authentic possibility for Italianità. Through the class-conscious lens of Christ Stopped at Eboli, this chapter examines the multiple worlds of the South that Italian and foreign photographers represented. The ideologically flexible nature of photography as well as the camera’s relative invisibility meant that, as a medium, it was able to document aspects of southern Italian life that could not be recorded in the same way in Communist art. PCI debates on the need to emancipate southern peasants from their cultural “backwardness,” revealed the difficulty of establishing an ethical and self-aware Marxist code of conduct toward the South. Because of its political ambivalence, humanist photography remains in a category of its own, only sometimes connecting with the socialist realist representations of the peasant movement. Unlike the art world, which was influenced by the Communist aesthetic line dictated by Moscow as part of Togliatti’s call to “go to the people” (andata al popolo), photography, like documentary film, insinuated itself into the marginalized, private world of peasant daily lives and devotion.⁸

The Madonna and Roosevelt

Despite the Italian Constitution, which confirmed the “values of the resistance,” and the progressive forces at work in the nation that affirmed democracy, liberalism, and decentralization as their antifascist pillars, conservative powers remained strong in the South.⁹ In March 1948, the United States had pledged two hundred million dollars (two-fifths of the Marshall Plan budget) to implement land reform in the south of Italy and Sardinia in an attempt to eliminate feudalism and introduce democracy through the redistribution of power.¹⁰ Due to political disagreements and conservative pressure from latifondisti, Christian Democrats, Communists, Monarchists, and the neofascist movement, governmental inertia was maintained on the issue of land reform. A 1949 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) study showed that despite the two billion lira pledged to land reform through the Marshall Plan European Recovery Programme in 1948, “the De Gasperi Government has failed so far to show any signs of having or soon developing any program of long range economic reform in Italy.”¹¹ In 1950, the Marshall Plan and the Italian government formed the “Fund for the South” (“Cassa per il Mezzogiorno”) in an attempt to eliminate the North-South economic divide. The first land reform measures (the “Sila law” and the “Stralcio law”) took place with about 680,000 hectares assigned to 113,000 peasant families from the latifondisti. However, they limited the expropriation to areas in which peasant pressure was strongest and feudal land more concentrated.¹² The “Fund for the South” was meant to quieten peasant unrest with land reform, swamp drainage to abate malaria and fund the building of roads, dams, schools, and rehousing settlements. However, it was mismanaged and left a lack of hospitals, schools, and infrastructure as well as increased deforestation and soil erosion and diminished market integration. This contributed to mass emigration and in 1951 alone, four out of seventeen million southerners left for the north of Italy, Western Europe, and the United States.¹³

Southern peasants arguably had a long established emotional connection with the United States since mass emigrations in the nineteenth century, when the poverty and the aridity of the land drove them away in millions. Levi observed that the peasants he met lived practically unaware of Mussolini and the Fascist regime and in turn were ignored by the government. In “almost every house” two images hung on the walls: “On one side was the black, scowling face, with its large, inhuman eyes, of the Madonna of Viggiano; on the other a colored print of the sparkling eyes, behind gleaming glasses, and the hearty grin of President Roosevelt.”¹⁴ The psychological bond felt by southerners toward the United States would have financial and political repercussions after the Second World War, with, for example, the hospital built in honor of Padre Pio in Puglia named after the mayor of New York, Fiorello La Guardia, who indirectly procured the funds to build it.¹⁵

The connection between the south of Italy and the United States can conversely be considered to have influenced American photographic activities that took place in the South during the Cold War via the legacy of photographers such as Jacob Riis, Alfred Stieglitz, and Lewis Hine, who had been photographing Italian immigrants in New York since the late nineteenth century. After the war, American military occupation had extended its southern Italian domain beyond large military camps to nonmilitary activities including the posting of academics, especially those working in the fields of sociology and anthropology, charity workers, and civil servants.¹⁶ At a time when the United States remained fearful of losing a strategically placed North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) country to the Communist threat, Italy became a focus of American covert operations.¹⁷ This did not mean that academics or charity workers were in the pay of the CIA, though they were working within what Edward Said has termed an “underlying consensus about knowledge” underwritten by Cold War concerns.¹⁸

The German-born American sociologist Friedrich George Friedmann and the American political scientist Edward Banfield were funded by United States universities and corporations to study southern Italians after the Second World War. Friedmann embodied the attitude of nostalgia for the peasants’ disappearing way of life, while Banfield, author of The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (1958), wrote a thesis on their psychological and social backwardness, illustrated with photographs.¹⁹ His position on the south of Italy was informed by Cold War paranoia of Communist power and his published thesis included numerous statistics and tables on the voting tendencies and political positions of the peasants. Coming from an American perspective, the impoverished state of southern Italy was easily compared to the United States in the 1930s, and the need for projects of the caliber of the Works Project Administration (WPA) and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).²⁰ The State Department of the United States’ government commissioned surveys of housing projects and inhabitants from renowned photographers like Marjory Collins, Ernst Haas, and Werner Bischof. Their approach to southern Italy corresponded to a dry, straightforward documentary style, at times accompanied with anthropological or National Geographic-style descriptions (e.g., “Sardinian people are very proud, have a keen sense of honor and cherish a strong clan spirit.”²¹). The American governmental approach to the South, in Collins’, Haas’, and Bischof’s work, corresponded to a vision close to that of the FSA project, which was sociological rather than connected to cultural anthropology, and aimed to achieve social and political reform. Collins had originally worked for the Office of War Information in New York in 1942, documenting Italian immigrants in Little Italy. These served to illustrate publications distributed behind enemy lines to let people in Axis-power countries know that “the US was sympathetic to their needs.”²² In 1950, the US State Department commissioned Collins to document progress made on housing projects in the South under the Marshall Plan. A fellow American, the artist, art critic, and socialite Milton Gendel, accompanied Collins on a trip to Sicily, where he took photographs, including one of Collins photographing Sicilian peasantry in Farmhouse in the Countryside of Caltagirona. Gendel’s and Collins’ photographs do not reveal that the photographic duo also spent time with Sicilian aristocracy. Gendel did not think it a good subject for his photography “considering it too obvious to register” and noting ironically that he would feel instead that he “was in the presence of a great subject when a peasant with a hoe, followed by a sort of village idiot, appeared on [his] path.”²³ Gendel arrived in Sicily with preconceived ideas of the people he would find, based on his knowledge of immigrant lives in New York, writing, “I soon realized how different the Sicily we were visiting was from the one I had brought in my head.”

On her postwar mission, Collins reported to the US Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) special mission to Italy, observing optimistically that the peasants, despite speaking sadly of the bombings, would do so “with smiles as bright as their famous sunshine [and] invariably say: ‘we like America!’ ”²⁴ Southern Italian admiration for America was part of a projection toward the American dream and the land of opportunity connected to their emigrant relatives. Possibly through her friendship with Gendel, who was engaged to the entrepreneur Adriano Olivetti’s daughter at the time, Collins received a number of commissions for Olivetti’s periodical Comunità: in 1950 she introduced the concept of the photo-essay to the periodical with her “Trip to the Cave-dwellings of Matera” (“Viaggio ai ‘Sassi’ di Matera”), which featured large-format images and short, factual texts by Riccardo Musatti to accompany them.²⁵

Olivetti’s constant search to create fruitful relations with American investors for Italian projects may have been another reason behind the publication of Collins’ photographs. Taken with a Rolleiflex, the black-and-white photographs document Fontamara and Matera from the “outside in” following a geographical and sociological methodology. In the article on Matera, the first page shows two photographs of Matera, one from a high vantage point and one that focuses on the caves below. On the next pages, the reader is taken through the interiors, with the habitual scenes: animals sharing living spaces with people, dark interiors, whitewashed walls covered in small photographs and holy pictures. Collins did not appear to select particular instances or subjects but included a lot of information with no particular focus. This approach can be compared to Evans’ search in the late 1930s for a new, democratic vision that avoided romanticism, the sentimental, pathos, and commercialism.

David Seymour’s photographs of southern illiterates, however, have a more aesthetically penetrating style that evokes a different affect. Seymour was a declared left-wing photojournalist who had worked for the French Communist periodical Regards and voted for the Popular Front in France, and his friendship and close collaboration with Carlo Levi allowed him to understand illiteracy from a more intimate and emotional perspective. Together they were meant to write an article titled “Italy Fights the Battle of Illiteracy” for Magnum. The article did not seem to go beyond draft stage, and is dated to 1949–50. Through Levi, Seymour would have learned about the south of Italy, its extreme poverty, and the campaign against illiteracy. Adult as well as child illiteracy was a problem, partly due to absenteeism. According to Levi in Christ Stopped at Eboli, the children of the village asked him to teach them because “they learned precious little at school with the inspiration of Don Luigi’s cane, cigars, and patriotic speeches; although attendance was obligatory they came out as illiterate as when they went in.”²⁶ Owing to the destruction of war, numbers had increased compared to the national statistics from 1931, when Sicily recorded 40 percent illiteracy, Lucania 46 percent, and Calabria 48 percent.²⁷

Seymour’s photograph of a man’s hands writing out the alphabet was part of a commission through Magnum for a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) photographic project on illiteracy in the south of Italy (Figure 3.3). In his unpublished writing, Levi drew attention to the peasants’ knowledge and creativity, observing that they “speak in rhyme and make use of their dialect of highly poetic images such as would put to shame not only the average city-dweller but many a professional writer as well.” He defended the peasants’ equation of literacy with authority: the written word to the peasant meant “the world of government, the army, the church and the landowners . . . military mobilization . . . new taxes imposed on their scanty harvest, or summonses to appear in court to answer for some crime of which they had no understanding.” Levi remarked that the majority of peasants did not see the connection between what is published and the way they lived their lives. Because they communicated in dialect, they saw the Italian language as a “literary creation and one reserved for public documents.”²⁸

FIGURE 3.3 David Seymour, Calabria. Town of Rogiano Gravina. The Battle against illiteracy. Peasant during a writing class 1950 © David Seymour/Magnum Photos.

In Seymour’s photograph, the man’s thick fingers hold a pen as he forms rows of imperfect a’s, his left hand holding down the page in a careful, childlike manner. By avoiding a photograph of his face, Seymour has not identified the man as an “illiterate peasant” for the rest of his life. Instead, the viewer is made aware of the difficulty, humiliation, and effort involved in adults learning to write. Other photographs in the series are half-bust portraits of men with expressions contorted by the struggle of learning, although even those confer a dignity to the peasants in part due to the composition and chiaroscuro lighting that lends the figures a solemnity. The photograph discussed was chosen by Edward Steichen for The Family of Man, no doubt due to its emotional strength and poignancy. Seymour’s photograph contrasts with the accusatory attitude that Italian photojournalism employed to picture the South, often inflected by the ideological complexities of “the southern question”.

The Politics of Miseria and the Communist Debate

Shortly before the highly contended elections on April 18, 1948 between Togliatti’s Partito nuovo and De Gasperi’s Democrazia Cristiana, the center-right weekly L’Europeo, among others, commissioned an inquiry (inchiesta) on the South, which was used as a political bargaining chip with which to persuade voters toward the Christian Democrat camp. Three photo-essays on the South, published between February 15 and March 21, 1948, revealed the miseria of the people and stereotyped peasants as ignorant and uncivilized.²⁹ The photojournalist Tino Petrelli, working for Vincenzo Carrese’s agency Publifoto, had traveled with the journalist Tommaso Besozzi to the South. Petrelli had been covering sports, news stories, and social reportage adopting and perfecting a so-called “Publifoto style” since 1937, when he was fifteen years old. Besozzi’s position on the South was patronizing and emotionally distant, treating southerners as a different people, calling for their civilization and emancipation from primitive conditions. Petrelli’s photograph of a schoolroom in Africo that illustrated the article subsequently acquired a quasi-iconic status, and was republished in a number of different periodicals (Figure 3.4). The article in L’Europeo came out at the height of political attention on the South, the fate of which hinged on the electoral results: the US government had declared that Marshall Plan aid would be suspended if the Communists won the elections.³⁰ Togliatti wanted to refuse the aid, and rallied for Italian financial and cultural independence, but the Christian Democrats, endorsed by the Vatican and the United States, achieved an absolute majority with 48.5 percent of the votes compared to 31 percent for the PCI.

FIGURE 3.4 Tino Petrelli, Africo: schoolchildren, L’Europeo, March 14, 1948.

Source: Biblioteca di storia moderna e contemporanea, Rome.

In the photograph, which was cropped and blown up for the article, a schoolgirl is wearing a blanket over her head to keep warm. Like a little Madonna, her dress is creased in ways reminiscent of pleats in Renaissance paintings. The cropping brings out her beauty and smile and adds to the pathos of the way she is trying to sit half off the bench in order to reach the heat of the coals. The caption reads: “Mixed school. Now on the eve of the elections even the miseria of the Calabresi risks becoming a reason to vote. Propagandists [Communists] are coming up from the valley to try to arouse the men and women dazed by their poverty.”³¹ Petrelli was championed for his raw documentary style, photojournalistic panache, and apparent lack of aesthetic finesse as part of a neorealist photographic vanguard that refused an amateur style, the gravitas of anthropological rhetoric, or any political speculation.³² And yet, the meaning of his photograph shifted with its accompanying article in which Besozzi observed that the peasants’ miseria annihilated their capacity to learn about a better way of living and that they needed to “wake up.”³³ This could be interpreted as a mixture of genuine pathos and northern Italian despair at the apparently hopeless situation of the South. Four years later, the same photograph was used in the Communist monthly Noi Donne, where the caption remarked that the photograph had been used in a “bourgeois” magazine in an unrelated article, which did not examine the reality of schools, the state of illiteracy, and child labor.³⁴ L’Europeo, a center-right, middlebrow large-format weekly appealed to the middle classes, like its competitors Epoca and Tempo. It published stories on aristocracy, actresses, governmental scandals, murders, and towed an anti-Communist line. L’Europeo’s political rivals were left-wing or Communist periodicals like Il Politecnico, Vie Nuove, Noi Donne, and Cinema Nuovo. Nearly every week, the newspaper would include an inchiesta (investigation) article, which after the war became a systematic way to examine a problematic national news issue, in which photographs were key but not displayed according to the American photo-essay pioneered in Life, which included less written information.

In Communist circles, the South was considered within more nuanced debates that tended to refer to, or argue against, Levi’s novel. In 1952, the Communist documentary filmmaker Michele Gandin made a thirteen-minute documentary on adult literacy progress in Basilicata titled Christ Did Not Stop at Eboli (Cristo non si è fermato a Eboli). In 1954, Mario Alicata, member of the Central Committee of the PCI and Togliatti’s right-hand man, critiqued Levi’s novel in his article “The Southern Question Cannot Stop at Eboli.”³⁵ Alicata maintained that Levi’s writing was ambiguous in its intents: it denounced “backwardness,” but elevated the people to a mythological state. In 1955, Gandin and the Sicilian photographer Enzo Sellerio collaborated on a photo-essay about Danilo Dolci’s newly founded utopian village, Borgo di Dio, in Sicily, creating an example of a left-wing reevaluation of accepted attitudes toward the South (Figure 3.5).

FIGURE 3.5 Enzo Sellerio, Borgo Di Dio, Cinema Nuovo, June 25, 1955 © Olivia and Antonio Sellerio.

Sellerio’s photographs, taken in the village of Partinico in 1954, are accompanied by Gandin’s essay “The Story of Borgo di Dio told by two Sicilian Fishermen.”³⁶ In Trappeto, the sociologist, poet, and activist Danilo Dolci known as the “Gandhi of the South” for his nonviolent protests (hunger strikes and strikes “in reverse”) against the government and authorities, had built a house, which was registered as a charitable institution, and named Borgo di Dio, or “God’s Village.” Here he housed orphans, built roads, and fought the injustices of the powerful and the mafia. He wanted to live “in brotherly love” with the poor, giving a voice to peasants, fishermen, prostitutes, outlaws, and bandits as he described in his book The Outlaws of Partinico (Banditi a Partinico), which was published in Italy in 1955 and translated into English in 1960.³⁷ Despite not being a Communist, he was written about nearly only in Communist press like L’Ora, Paese Sera, and L’Unità. Following in the Cinema Nuovo tradition of using the photo-essay (fotodocumentario) to inspire neorealist filmmakers with new real-life subjects and ideas, Gandin and Sellerio’s photo-essay proposed a film on Borgo di Dio.

The photographs were displayed experimentally, with some photographs flush with the edge of the page and others not. This gives the article a photo-album, handmade style, which appears to imitate the imperfections of the documentary style and the social “imperfections” of those photographed. In a letter to Gandin, Sellerio wrote: “I would be very grateful to you if you could, in your selection, take into account the unitary concept according to which this work was conducted. You know very well that I did not just want to underline the external aspects of abject poverty (miseria) but also wanted to capture the communal spirit of the inhabitants of the place.”³⁸ A man declared mentally ill in the top left photograph in Figure 3.5 is “protected” by bars, and his family preferred to look after him themselves; an elderly woman reaches up to tend to a shrine overhung with oranges; a black strip of cloth on a metal door is said to be a sign of mourning.³⁹ The intimate everyday actions of the people from Trappeto are connected to family and community life through their religious devotion and superstitions. The “marginalized” are shown to be an integral part of the society in the utopian Borgo di Dio, including, if not especially, the mentally disabled, widows, and the ill. After being published in Cinema Nuovo, the photographs featured in Sellerio’s first personal exhibition at the contemporary art gallery L’Obelisco in Rome in 1956, marking one of the first inclusions of humanist photography in the Italian art world.⁴⁰

Communist debates on the South emphasized the desire to engage with the idea of the peasant world rather than rejecting it outright as “backward” and ignorant. Nevertheless, only particular aspects of the peasant world were officially acceptable for discussion on PCI agendas. In the art production of the period, socialist realist subjects repeated artistic prototypes that lauded virile and productive occupations (labor, mining, strikes), while the “feminine” world of the peasants (magic, song, dance, dialects, prevalence of the irrational) tended to be despised. De Martino, a Marxist, would be one of the first to explore their devotional world from an anthropological perspective. Christ Stopped at Eboli had been his inspiration to explore the idea of magic in peasant lore, although he took issue with the novel in an article in 1949 titled “On the Cultural History of a Subaltern World” (“Intorno a una storia culturale del mondo subalterno”), criticizing Levi for his approximate notions of spirituality in Basilicata.⁴¹ In 1951, Communists in turn attacked his article for “reflecting a bourgeois point of view,” observing that “the forms of popular culture [De Martino] referred to (folklore, magic, etc.) could never be progressive and were vestiges of the past that should be completely transcended.”⁴² De Martino led his expeditions amid the heated PCI debates on the potential emancipation of peasants, pioneering Italian visual anthropology through the selection of photographers who accompanied him.

Sex, Magic, and Anthropology

It was after seeing the French photographer André Martin’s pictures of the dances of the possessed that De Martino was drawn to examine the practice from an anthropological perspective (Figure 3.6). Martin’s photographs are suffused with a sense of timelessness and otherworldliness, acquired through the grainy quality of the image and the arresting scenes witnessed. The captions in Sud e Magia (1959) include detailed information about the possessed woman whom others are “trying to exorcise by making her kiss an image of St. Bruno, in vain. Despite a second attempt at exorcism, the aberrant and perverse personality that has taken hold of the woman does not leave its prey.”⁴³ In this short book, De Martino briefly covered the possessed woman, whom he would write about in depth in La terra del rimorso, published in 1961.⁴⁴ Both books contained photographs by Martin, who traveled to the Mezzogiorno in 1958 with his wife Michelle Caroly after reading Christ Stopped at Eboli and meeting Carlo Levi in Rome as well as Alberto Moravia who, however, tried to dissuade them from going further South, since in his view civilization ended in Rome. The young couple set off on a five-month adventure, armed with a Leica, their journey dictated by a Barbanera calendar that indicated all religious processions and celebrations throughout Italy.⁴⁵ Martin captured six shots in quick succession of a woman undergoing a possession. She would have been called a tarantolata, and performed a tarantata, or a dance under the influence of the venom from the bite of a (fictional) spider. Men could be tarantolati, although the majority were women.⁴⁶ The imagined venom would need to be exorcized through specific ritual dance steps in a private home, accompanied by musicians. Subsequently, the tarantolati from the region would gather at the church of San Paolo in Galatina in Puglia from June 28 to 30 each year, where they would repeat the crisis of their possession and “neurosis” for a larger crowd.⁴⁷

FIGURE 3.6 André Martin, Serra San Bruno, Calabria, E. De Martino, Sud e magia, 1959 © Yan Martin/MyPhototek.com.

Men and women relied on magic in many aspects of their lives, from illness to Eros. Magic was used to seduce the opposite sex, although women, “traditionally passive in the affairs of love,” would recourse to it more than men.⁴⁸ Love philters were concocted from a mixture of blood and pubic hair dried in the oven, which would produce a powder that was taken to church where an incantation addressed to the blood of Christ and the devil was recited at Mass.⁴⁹ The consecration in church invested the powder with magic. Other “fascinations” or spells were procured through objects such as knots as symbols of union, or objects placed under beds to guarantee fertility. Like Martin, the Communist photographer Ando Gilardi who accompanied De Martino on an expedition in 1957 also used quick succession shots instead of a planned reconstitution of events to capture gestures and histrionic expressions in series as his subjects told their stories in order to document certain rituals, behavior patterns, or to contextualize an oral recording. Gilardi’s photographic series correspond to particular chapters in De Martino’s book Sud e Magia published in 1959.

De Martino and his team were discovering traditional modes of life and ways of worshiping at a time when cultural anthropology had become a mainstream interest, with Claude Lévi-Strauss’ memoirs Tristes tropiques published in 1955. That year Jean Rouch, the French filmmaker and ethnologist, had made the “ethnofiction” Les maîtres fous about the Hauka movement in which Africans imitated their colonial oppressors in a possessed trance. The French professor of ethnopsychiatry, François Laplantine’s essay on Martin’s photographs eventually published in Les noires vallées du repentir in 1975, describes the Italian peasants’ deep-set “pathology” and their similarity to African cultures, revealing the civilization as dark, diseased, and “primitive.”⁵⁰ Danilo Dolci, whom Martin had met during his travels in Sicily, wrote a softer-toned preface to the book evoking the richness of the peasants’ precious knowledge of their environment, which if unheeded would be knowledge lost for humankind. Martin’s photographs differ from those taken by the three photographers who were commissioned by De Martino during the 1950s (Zavattini, Pinna, and Gilardi) and maintained a scientific distance from their subjects. Martin, instead, had passed through the villages under the guise of an innocuous tourist. The village priests, unaware of Martin’s anticlerical mission, allowed him to photograph everything. They would disappear during the tarantolate, quietly condoning the dances through their absence. Martin tried to sell the series to Life magazine but Henry Luce’s wife, the ex-ambassador to Italy and converted Roman Catholic, Claire Booth-Luce, forbade its publication on account of its negative representation of Catholicism.⁵¹ Martin’s anticlerical aim to denounce Catholicism through his witnessing of southern religious practices was temporarily foiled, although De Martino’s inclusion of his work in his anthropological studies gave the photographs a more niche exposure.

Pinna’s photographs, on the other hand, published in La terra del rimorso were taken within a set, quasi-scientific remit according to De Martino’s area of research on the yearly cycles of tarantolate. The use of different linguistic registers features as an important aspect of the anthropological studies; even the title (which translates as The Land of Remorse) was a pun on “rimorso” meaning “remorse” but also “bitten again” referring to the spider dance. The captions to the photographs also reveal a contradictory attitude toward the tarantolati. Pinna’s photographs in the book feature as three separate sets: the first two series of twenty-nine photographs feature the reconstructed dances of Maria di Nardò and Rosaria di Nardò from the summer of 1959. Abstrusely named “ciclo coreutico” (the “choreutes” is Ancient Greek for the “art of choral song and dance”), the series documents the evolution of the dance from the time that the possessed woman entered the “stage” from behind a curtain in a private home, to the moment when, two days later, she came into the “graces” of Saint Paul at San Paolo in Galatina. The accompanying captions relay the physical movements of the woman and describe the music and the beat, crucial elements of the dance. They read like a set choreography: “. . . she concludes the cycle lumbering . . . and then she falls to the floor in the arms of relatives ready to catch her . . . she returns to the sleeping position” (Figure 3.7).⁵² The third series of ten photographs documents improvised scenes of tarantolati in the chapel and in the street. In comparison to the solemn tone of the captions for the reconstructed scenes, these appear fairly judgmental by contemporary anthropological standards: in photograph n. 33 Caterina di Nardò is “immersed in her nervous depression” and in n. 34 she gets up “in order to let the old peasant [Donato Di Matino] accomplish his mystical acrobatics more easily.”⁵³ Once the possessed are considered out of the scientific realm of anthropological research and therefore out of control, they seem to be treated with diminished respect.

FIGURE 3.7 Franco Pinna, Maria di Nardò’s choral song and dance cycle (Il ciclo coreutico di Maria di Nardò), E. De Martino, La terra del rimorso, 1961 © Annamaria Greci Pinna, Riccardo Pinna. Courtesy of Archivio Franco Pinna, Rome.

The tone of the captions in De Martino’s book resembles that of attention-seeking articles on southern Italy, like the captions used to describe Chiara Samugheo’s photo-essay on the tarantate of Galatina first published in Le Ore in 1953 and subsequently as a fotodocumentario in Cinema Nuovo in 1955.⁵⁴ The article titled “The Fury of the Dance” is written in conspiratorial tones, commenting on the “hysteria” of the possessed, with a caption reading “the last contortions of the collective dance end in a frenetic rolling about on the floor among unseemly screams and hiccups,” in contradiction with the periodical’s premise to never print captions that were “judgements, personal interpretations, polemical references, or variations that did not respond to the most scrupulous informational honesty.”⁵⁵ The photographs are unsympathetically comedic, including one showing a policeman, his eyes lifted to the ceiling as though in despair and embarrassment, standing in the midst of the madness. Le Ore acquired a reputation for scandal-mongering—founded in Milan in 1953 by Salvato Cappelli, it covered tabloid-type news as well as international news and politics, but over the years the amount of text per article diminished, at times using only lengthy captions for the photographs.⁵⁶ Eventually, in the 1960s it acquired a pornographic section for which it became best known, finally closing down in 1966. Samugheo’s documentary photographs appear to remove the dynamism of the possession, often fixing dancers in ungainly positions. At times, they portrayed the dancing protagonists from above, diminishing their agency compared to Martin’s photographs that give a sense of the woman’s rebellion in her psychological transportation. Martin, by using quick shot successions, also managed to capture a film-like experience that reproduced movement.

The way in which photography could alter the reality of the dance and make it look strange and embarrassing, rather than transcendent and powerful, becomes clear from Gianfranco Mingozzi’s short documentary La Taranta released in 1962. Made in conjunction with one of De Martino’s expeditions, the film corresponds in images and protagonists to the photographic shots from 1959 published in La terra del rimorso in 1961. The filmed dance shows the way in which it acted as a popular cathartic event and included carnival-like subversive behavior, meant as a release both for the dancer and the public. Saint Paul told one of the women photographed in Sud e magia to dress as a bride, which she then did every year.⁵⁷ The dance was also a moment when a woman could release her sexuality and a man could lose control. During a tarantata, if a “possessed” woman found an attractive man in the onlooking crowd, she would lead him into a frenetic erotic dance in front of the gathered crowd.⁵⁸ This was a rare occasion since dancing between men and women was not part of the culture, and despite the introduction of swing and rock ’n’ roll from the United States, dances in the South were, according to photographs by Caio Mario Garrubba and Leonard Freed, among others, organized as men-only events.

As David Forgacs argues, religious rituals were a psychologically layered performative procedure that distanced the sufferers from their pain.⁵⁹ Some of the performers were flattered by the photographic attention, their theatrical roles reinforced by the fact that the same “actors” would perform year after year for the anthropologists: Maria di Nardò who had performed for De Martino’s team and for Pinna in 1959 was photographed the next year by the anthropologist Annabella Rossi and on at least three other occasions in the 1970s.⁶⁰ The anthropological team never appears in the frame, maintaining an illusion of an intimate reality rather than a scientifically conducted mimesis. With the publication of a contact strip from Pinna’s archive, Forgacs demonstrates that the presence of the camera crew, microphones and, at one point, of De Martino’s leg in Pinna’s photographs, were automatically edited out of the photographic versions for publication to maintain the suspension of disbelief.⁶¹ As such, di Nardò can be considered an “anthropological actress.” The collaboration of the dancers was unlike that experienced by Levi with a woman whom he wanted to paint but had refused, “on account of the tangible sway I should exercise over her just as, to her mind, I undoubtedly exercised it over the people and things and trees and villages that were the subjects of my painting.”⁶² Levi’s strategic use of violence on his sitter to make her pose for him revealed that “she knew no greater happiness than that of being dominated by an absolute power.”⁶³ The violence, eroticism, and magic in being photographed and allowing someone to “take something away from the sitter” would have implicitly accompanied the photographic representation of the dances. The spiritual possession could be seen as a self-conscious, quasi-cinematic collaboration between the photographer (cameraman), the ethnologist (film director), and the possessed (actor). Maria di Nardò’s paroxysms on the floor surrounded by drummers can arguably be compared to Tazio Secchiaroli’s famous first paparazzo shots of Aïché Nana’s impromptu striptease in the street outside a high society Roman gathering in a nearby restaurant in 1958 (Figure 3.8). The scandalous events of that evening inspired the creation of La Dolce Vita and Fellini modeled his paparazzo character on Secchiaroli, coining the word paparazzo.

FIGURE 3.8 Tazio Secchiaroli, Aïché Nana, L’Espresso, November 16, 1958.

Source: Biblioteca di storia moderna e contemporanea, Rome.

Maria di Nardò, the peasant, and Aïché Nana, the glamorous Lebanese exhibitionist, could not have been from more socially opposed worlds. And yet, the imagery brings out the latent eroticism of the tarantata. Due to social repression of female sexuality by both reigning belief systems in the Cold War—Catholicism and Communism—this was for the most part ignored in the articles written on the topic at the time and elegantly circumvented in De Martino’s writings. Levi, on the other hand, observed of southern women that “behind their veils the women were like wild beasts. They thought nothing of love-making, in the most natural way in the world, and they spoke of it with a license and simplicity of language that were astonishing. When you went by them on the street their black eyes stared at you, with a slanting downward glance as if to measure your virility, and behind your back you could hear them pass whispered judgements on your hidden charms.”⁶⁴ Because of their anthropological, “scientific” nature, Pinna’s and Samugheo’s photographs of the dance of the possessed tended to edit out its spectacular aspects and the way in which the exorcisms were a cathartic form of theater and an occasion to bring together the community in a heightened collective experience. The importance of theater in southern culture was remarked upon by David Seymour in an unpublished article on the performance of the Passion of Christ and a connected representation of the Chase of the Jew in the Madonie near Palermo.⁶⁵ He observed that the plays were disappearing due to their costly production fees, which until recently, had been paid by the local aristocracy. According to Seymour,

The Sicilian is a born actor. He loves music, and the treasure of Sicilian religious chants is very rich. In every village there is enough talent to produce a play, and they do it out in the open, in movie houses or other public halls. In certain villages or towns these Passion plays have age-old traditions, with roles handed down the families through the generations.⁶⁶

Pinna would, in a strange mise en abyme, become Fellini’s set photographer for La Dolce Vita, shortly before his last expedition with De Martino in the South. Perhaps not coincidentally, Samugheo, like Pinna and others, including Arturo Zavattini and Gianfranco Mingozzi (who were part of the film crew for La Dolce Vita), became involved in the world of film in the late 1950s after their initial foray into the anthropological, theatrical South.

Photographers Marginalized

Franco Pinna was the photographer on whom De Martino relied most throughout his expeditions, although he also availed himself of the services of Arturo Zavattini—son of the neorealist film director and scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini—as well as the previously mentioned André Martin and Ando Gilardi. The three Italian photographers (Pinna, Zavattini, and Gilardi) have been historicized as a group in I viaggi nel Sud di Ernesto De Martino (1999).⁶⁷ Scholarship has also dedicated them individual attention. Here, I have widened the discourse on southern peasant rituals to include non-Italian anthropological photographers like André Martin and nonanthropological photographers like Chiara Samugheo, in order to have an overview of photographic practices in the South around the same time.

In Italy, one of the recurring problems photographers faced in the 1950s was the lack of public and individual recognition, unlike that fought for and achieved by Magnum photographers Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, who had founded their agency in 1947 with George Rodger and David Seymour.⁶⁸ For instance, in the monthly Comunità, the American Marjory Collins was the first photographer to be credited in an article. Until her photo-essays, Italian photographers were only at times credited in the index of the magazine, but never in the articles. In an attempt to champion photographers’ rights to be credited, and inspired by the Magnum model, Pinna founded the first Italian photographic cooperative—Fotografi Associati—in Rome in 1952 with his coworkers Pablo Volta and Nicola Sansone.⁶⁹ Volta and Sansone were also Sardinian, which would have involved them personally in the North-South divide and the need to reclaim rights for disempowered cultures, as well as disempowered occupations, like photography.

Paradoxically, Pinna suffered the greatest injuries in terms of De Martino’s acknowledgment of his work. Pinna’s photographs were not only published in articles De Martino wrote for periodicals such as Comunità, but also in his books Morte e pianto rituale, Sud e magia, and La terra del rimorso.⁷⁰ In Morte e pianto rituale, the ethnologist included nineteen photographs by Pinna, for which he was acknowledged in an unfortunate misspelled footnote as Franco Piuma (while “pinna” translates as fish fin, “piuma” means feather, seemingly adding a comical “zoological” angle to the typo). Other iconographic sources by different photographers in the book are acknowledged without misspellings and with grateful thanks in the main text.⁷¹ In Sud e magia, De Martino included a dozen photographs by Pinna and only a few by André Martin and Ando Gilardi. All three were thanked indiscriminately for their “intelligent collaboration” at the end of his introduction. In the appendix of the book De Martino makes special mention of André Martin, his “friend,” a few of whose photographs of the possessed he found “interesting.” In La terra del rimorso, forty of Franco Pinna’s photographs were acknowledged in a label added post publication at the end of the bibliography. These oversights triggered protestations on Pinna’s part and ended in a court case against the publisher, Mondadori. In a document that remained unpublished until 2002, Pinna angrily wrote: “One cannot work for free. . . . Then I see the first copy and there is nothing. I protest and they want to put me at the end of the list of the tarantolati.”⁷² Pinna’s outrage at being considered part of the list of the possessed dancers was a protestation against the photographer’s marginalized position.

Similarly, a legal dispute arose when Crocenzi protested at not being acknowledged as the author of the photographs in Elio Vittorini’s novel-in-photographs Conversazione in Sicilia (1953). Vittorini had put him down as mere a “collaborator” in the photographic sessions.⁷³ The dispute was followed in the press for some months until Vittorini decided to remove the illustrated book from circulation. In 1954, he wrote a letter to Cinema Nuovo in which he defended the project and his relationship to Crocenzi, observing that he had directed the photographic shoot, pointing Crocenzi toward the subjects he wanted shot.⁷⁴ He observed that out of the 1,600 photographs Crocenzi took under his direction, he was able to select only 169 (some of which were “shot” by Giovanni Pirelli), and “I had to recur, in order to fill the gaps, to seven photographs by Giacomo Pozzi-Bellini and twelve scenes from common postcards.”⁷⁵ Arguably, Vittorini’s novel-in-photographs was a failure due to the lack of aesthetic flair in Crocenzi’s photographs, where landscapes appear dim and flat, void of the characters that animate the novel. Nevertheless, his lack of accreditation reveals the way in which the figure of the photographer was undermined, if not altogether ignored, while the medium itself was endowed with increasing importance. While photography played a crucial role in De Martino’s work, the anthropologist’s position on the medium was essentially indifferent and utilitarian because his methodology was anchored in an ethnological tradition where the role of images was weak, acting only as support to his theories.

De Martino’s attitude toward the peasants appeared to alternate between admiration for an ancient culture on the verge of disappearing and disapproval of their backwardness and ignorance. Like the photographers, there appeared to be attempts at wresting the voice and agency of the peasants throughout the research, which could be founded in his methodology, but would ultimately be due to his conventionally elitist view of culture.⁷⁶ De Martino’s ethnographic methodology was based on a Marxist critique of social class and an interest in “the science of Soviet folklorism” for introducing the concept of “cultural products from the popular world as protest against their subaltern condition.”⁷⁷ He believed it necessary to have a direct connection with peasants and incorporate their folklore as part of the Gramscian concept of an Italian cultural hegemony between peasants, workers, and intellectuals. Because of his Marxist position, De Martino was inspired by how popular satire of class privilege in the Soviet Union brought about “the folklore of forced labour, workers’ folklore and . . . the folklore linked to the October Days.”⁷⁸ He rejected what he thought of as the “idolatry of archaisms” and popular culture, positioning himself as a critical ethnographer, suspicious of American cultural anthropology and its “natural objectivism” and maintaining that his “ethnology could not not be Eurocentric.”⁷⁹ In spite of his Marxist outlook, or perhaps because of it, De Martino’s position on the southern peasants mirrored his lack of consideration for the figure of the photographer, and was not necessarily based on scientific analysis. In an article published in Comunità titled “The Life and Death of Lucanian Peasants” (“Vita e morte dei contadini Lucani”), he commented on Pinna’s photographs of children: “To be happy at their age is natural, although their infantile joy contrasts with something senile and malicious in their expressions that makes one ill at ease.”⁸⁰

De Martino argued that the people’s poverty and hard lives made them age sooner and suffer diseases. His indictment of their miseria, however, was based on the visual analysis of a photograph. Gilardi claimed that when away from the peasants De Martino would say that they did not believe in anything, “they are buffoons,” and that “the real hauntings ended a century ago.”⁸¹ De Martino’s solidarity with the peasants was not contingent on class-conscious ethics. The peasants’ reactions to the research were not taken into account. This was not the case in the work of documentary filmmaker Vittorio De Seta, director of the celebrated docu-fiction Banditi a Orgosolo (1961), who observed that it was only when they had watched his documentary films that the peasants became aware that theirs was a “culture.”

The treatment of “marginalized” topics such as the social world of peasants can be considered in relation to the treatment of the marginalized figure of the photographer, and often, of the documentary filmmaker. Documentary film was forced to combat increasingly heavy censorship rules under the Christian Democrat Undersecretary for the performing arts, Giulio Andreotti. In office from May 31, 1947 to July 28, 1953, Andreotti began a campaign against representations of indigence due to a rising concern with the negative image of Italy abroad.⁸² The Andreotti Law (Legge Andreotti) of December 1949 forced filmmakers seeking state funding to submit scripts, lists of the names involved, and budget proposals acting as a form of indirect censorship, where neorealist filmmakers could be singled out and their projects preemptively obstructed.⁸³ Cinema Nuovo was founded partly as a riposte to the Andreotti Law and because avant-garde Communist writers working for the prewar periodical Cinema were no longer able to sustain a relationship with its politically moderate editorial team.⁸⁴

The articles in the first Cinema Nuovo number pleaded with Andreotti to release the finances he had blocked in order to continue making “high-quality documentaries.”⁸⁵ In Gandin and Sellerio’s photo-essay on Borgo di Dio examined in the first section of this chapter, they addressed their last paragraph to the Christian Democrat Parliamentarian, the Honorable Scalfaro, requesting his opinion on the matter and polemically raising the question of censorship. The article ends asking whether Oscar Luigi Scalfaro would censor a potential film on the subject “even if [it] would be a violent accusation of the powerful, of injustice, and of bad administration of public property?”⁸⁶ The fotodocumentario placed aesthetic importance on photography and systematically credited the photographer alongside the author, countering the trend of “marginalized topic—marginalized medium.” All the same, Cinema Nuovo editors knew their periodical was an indication that the appeal of neorealist film was waning as a framework through which to understand Communist ideals of social reform.

For a Mediterranean Light

In the art world, Soviet cultural edicts on socialist realism were integrated into the Italian Communist “going to the people” campaign. The PCI organized and commissioned encounters between intellectuals, artists, and peasants, which were given systematic coverage in, for example, L’Unità, Il Lavoro, and Paese Sera.⁸⁷ The painter Renato Guttuso, a Sicilian and a Marxist, voiced the emotional connection he felt toward his worker and peasant subjects, observing:

[They] are close to my heart, because I am one of them, and their faces appear before me whatever I do. Sicilian peasants are such a large part of the history of Italy and have given so much of their blood to it that they, under the guidance of the working class, are writing our country, an independent Sicily capable of breaking its cage of misery, mafia, feudalism, which has been oppressing it for centuries.⁸⁸

As a Sicilian, Guttuso painted Sicilian working-class subjects, such as fishermen, sulfur miners, and peasants on strike or occupying land, as part of PCI-funded art trips.

Photographs of similar themes abound, although the intentions behind them may have differed enormously from the PCI requisites. For example, Fulvio Roiter’s photograph Sulphur Mine (Zolfatara) taken in Sicily in 1953 and published in Germano Celant’s The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943-1968 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1994, was not meant for publication in any Communist periodical (Figure 3.9).⁸⁹ Using a Welta camera and a motorized bicycle, Roiter toured Sicily for one month, taking time out of his chemistry studies in Mestre with a 50,000 lire loan from his father. Roiter had enjoyed D. H. Lawrence’s travel books on southern Italy and Elio Vittorini’s Conversazione in Sicilia making him yearn for a sense of dépaysement and exoticism. He was looking for his photographic big break, and sought to unleash the potential he found in the fascinating exoticism of the South. Roiter, who voted Christian Democrat after the Second World War, did not go to the South with the intentions that brought the Communists, like Guttuso, there. And yet, his sulfur miner echoed contemporary Communist concerns with the plight of the miners. Roiter’s photograph is arresting because it corresponds to a classical ideal of male nudity. In an interview, Roiter recounted the dramatic episode when he was lowered into the mine:

FIGURE 3.9 Fulvio Roiter, Sulphur Mine (Zolfatara), 1953 © Fulvio Roiter.

I jumped into one of the trolleys that would surface from the mine, after it had been emptied of the minerals, without asking for permission. After being lowered into the cave, I found Dante’s Inferno. I had to work quickly and in darkness, with magnesium powder for the flash, which was dangerously explosive in those conditions. The mine was unbearably hot, while the sulphur made your skin itch unbearably; nudity, or at most a loincloth, were the only viable options with which to work.⁹⁰

A similar, if less classically composed scene, featured as the cover page of the Communist Worker’s Union (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro—CGIL) news organ, Il Lavoro, a year earlier, on February 23, 1952 (Figure 3.10). This illustrated Italian periodical, lasting from 1948 to 1962, featured three important photographers in its newsroom: Nicola Sansone, Caio Mario Garrubba, and Ando Gilardi, who observed that the magazine was unlike the “militant” Il Politecnico or the “spartacist” Der Arbeiter-Fotograf, but close in style to Life.⁹¹ Perhaps due to the strong presence of visually aware staff, it was a Communist periodical that distinguished itself for its attention to the graphic design of the cover and for its prolific use of high-quality photographs. Here, the workers’ nudity is preserved by a red banner listing the contents of the issue, regarding the fight for workers’ rights. In the early 1950s, sulfur miners became a symbol of the oppressed working classes due to their terrible working conditions, nearing slavery, under the command of pitiless, exploitative mine owners. Guttuso, who had been painting them since 1948, painted Head of a Sulphur Miner (Testa di Zolfataro) the same year that Roiter took his photograph (Figure 3.11).

FIGURE 3.10 Cover of Il Lavoro, February 23, 1952.

FIGURE 3.11 Renato Guttuso, Head of a sulphur miner (Testa di Zolfataro), 1953, oil on plywood, 58 × 52.5 cm, private collection, Rome © Renato Guttuso by SIAE 2015.

The eyes of Guttuso’s miner meet those of the viewer with a level stare. His set mouth and taut neck convey a defiance, which, however, is belied by his enslaved condition, creating a strong rhetorical tension that elevates his indigence and powerlessness to the romance of revolution. The expression of Roiter’s miner, however, is not visible. With his back turned away from the viewer, the focus is on the male body as an object of contemplation. At ideologically polar extremes, Guttuso’s Zolfataro is an “orthodox” head shot of a handsome miner who appears to have a revolutionary potential against his condition, while Roiter’s concern with form and light emphasized a vision that had little in common with the political agendas of socialist realist art. Although his Sicilian photographs were not published for a year, they earned him his first contract with Alain Mermoud’s prestigious Swiss publishing house La Guilde du Livre.⁹² Mermoud’s luxury book series was aimed at high-market tourism where Roiter’s sulfur miner would possibly have appeared paradoxical and out of place.

Photographers who went South were often automatically branded Communist on the sole basis of their interest in the South. In a posthumously published essay, Levi wrote disappointedly about a half-naked tattooed cave-dweller who attacked him in Sardinia for having a camera around his neck. He called Levi a Communist and accused him of wanting to publish photographs of his poverty in Communist periodicals.⁹³ This little vignette, only published in 1996, reflected the simplified reality whereby a “neorealist” style was equated with scandal-mongering left-wing intellectuals, who would generally have come from the North. Roiter, like many of the photographers who were intrigued by the South, was from the North and belonged to a camera club: La Gondola in Venice.⁹⁴ Founded by the photographer and political economist Paolo Monti in January 1948, La Gondola, also known as the “Venetian school” (scuola veneziana) stood in contrast to La Bussola, founded in Milan by the photographer and lawyer Giuseppe Cavalli in December 1947.⁹⁵ Paolo Monti took photographs that engaged in an active dialogue with art as well as street photography filled with a melancholy humanism. A photographer and a critic whose varied production has been systematically overlooked in scholarship, Monti was venerated by fellow photographers who saw him as their mentor and continue to consider him a key figure in the history of Italian photography.⁹⁶

Debates between the “formalists” (La Bussola) and the “neorealists” (La Gondola) featured in one of the main specialized photography periodicals of the time, Ferrania. The two factions held contrasting views on the use and role of photography, which were linked to the competitiveness of the nascent industry, contrasting political positions and antagonisms that arose between the heads of the groups and, sometimes, personal disagreements. Cavalli argued that La Gondola’s realist trend and its derivative, photojournalism, were obstacles to creativity and artistic photography, while La Bussola was considered by the opposition to be a carry-on of Fascist times, which maintained a modishness in the 1920s and 1930s. Cavalli sought to achieve a national photographic style that would capture “Mediterranean photography—bright, formal . . . full of light.”⁹⁷ His photographic themes were solarization, abstraction, and geometrics.⁹⁸ He promoted Croce’s idealist aesthetics based on the idea of art as the product of an intuition where feeling and image met, and denied it the need to have a moral or conceptual significance. Zannier, a pioneer of the “neorealist” image, believed Cavalli’s type of photography risked indicting the national style for excessive mannerism due to its “white tones and great melancholy.”⁹⁹ Cavalli’s photograph of a sunny abandoned terrace, Puglia (1940) was an ascetic-aesthetic view of the South, deliberately not depending on a subject and refusing any documentary narrative (Figure 3.12).

FIGURE 3.12 Giuseppe Cavalli, Puglia, c. 1950, published in Subjektive Fotografie, 1952. Courtesy Archivio Giuseppe Cavalli.

An empty chair is the protagonist of a quiet, meditative photograph on a sunny southern day, far away from the chaotic scenes of the neorealist genre exemplified in the photojournalist style explored earlier. Needles from a pine tree frame the photograph on the upper edge. The soft diffuse light characteristic of Cavalli’s photographs was due to the milk-like light of the Adriatic coast, different from the dark, more contrasted, light of the Tyrrhenian (West) coast.¹⁰⁰ Cavalli came from Puglia originally, and moved to Senigallia, remaining on the east coast and able to continue photographing in his acquired style. Puglia was published in the German photographer Otto Steinert’s annual catalogue Subjektive Fotografie, a veritable bible for Italian photographers in the early 1950s for La Bussola and La Gondola alike.¹⁰¹ Cavalli promoted the work of young photographers and in December 1953 he founded Misa, an off-shoot of La Bussola, in Senigallia.¹⁰² Its members would include Mario Giacomelli (the group’s treasurer), Alfredo Camisa, and Piergiorgio Branzi among others. Although the club maintained Cavalli’s literary-cultural aura, all three photographers developed a high-contrast photography, in which they focused on social issues while paying attention to their formal expression.

Branzi had read Christ Stopped at Eboli and knew about the young peasant author and poet Rocco Scotellaro, who became the mayor of Tricarico in 1946 at the age of twenty-three and had recently published a novel, Southern Peasants (Contadini del Sud) in 1954. Driven by a spirit of curiosity and adventure, Branzi traveled from Florence to the south of Italy in 1955 on a Guzzi motorbike with his brother-in-law.¹⁰³ Subject to the prejudices of his time, Branzi recalls Cavalli remarking, “Well if you’ve gone to the South, you must have become a Communist.” Branzi was not a Communist. Although keeping his worship private and separate from his practice, he had a strong Catholic faith, connected to the radical intelligentsia that grew in Florence after the war. A progressive existential Catholic ideology, embodied in particular by Giorgio La Pira (under whom Branzi studied law in Florence in the early 1950s) and Don Milani, influenced him. Branzi observed that he did not want to dwell on the poverty of the South, but was interested in photographing the dignity of the people. He said he was looking for their “humanity.” One of his few photographs from his trip (he only had twelve photographs on his Rolleiflex film) shows a young boy with his back to the camera, his thumb pressed against the wall (Figure 3.13).

FIGURE 3.13 Piergiorgio Branzi, Tricarico, 1955 © Piergiorgio Branzi. Courtesy Archivio Piergiorgio Branzi.

Branzi’s composition takes into account the masses: the boy’s black, round head stands out against the wall, divided into two swathes of paint—one whitewashed and one painted light gray, opposing the boy’s white shirt and black shorts. The photographer experimented with different cuts of the image, at times excluding the door opening in the distance, at times increasing it to include a section of landscape beyond the wall. He wanted to photograph the boy’s interesting face, but out of shyness, the boy contorted himself away from him. The rigorous sense of composition reflects Branzi’s claim that he does not like art “dominated by random acts” but prefers it “where intellect is stronger than emotion.” To illustrate his point he used a metaphor, saying, “I was engaged to Cartier-Bresson, but married to Strand.”

Branzi consciously developed his high-contrast style in the early 1950s through inspiration from different sources, including Steinert’s Subjektive Fotografie. His “drawing lessons, from Masaccio to Raphael” in the Florentine museums taught him a sense of weights, balance, and composition. He described Masaccio’s The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden in the Cappella Brancacci of the Chiesa del Carmine in Florence as “peasants, the colour of the figures is heavy. Adam and Eve are walking. . . . If you look where they have been, you can see their footprints. . . . [Tuscans] are attached to the earth.”¹⁰⁴ In the photographs of the boy, Branzi’s minimalism and clean lines are reminiscent of the simplicity of southern architecture, creating an image of neatness, like Cavalli’s, as opposed to the disorderly humanity prevalent in previously examined photo-essays. Two of Branzi’s photographs of Lucania were published in an exhibition catalogue in 1956 for a group show of La Bussola. Eventually in the late 1950s Branzi decided, while maintaining his practice to some extent, to abandon the idea of becoming a professional photographer in favor of a more stable job as news anchor for the Italian national television station—the RAI—in Moscow.

For the young vernacular photographers from the North like Branzi, as well as Alfredo Camisa, Nino Migliori, and Gianni Berengo Gardin, who were connected to the growing photo-amateur circles, the south of Italy represented a dream (or a nightmare) on which they worked to develop their own voices, seemingly connected to ideas of melancholy and nostalgia for a disappearing way of life that they had not necessarily experienced. Their photographic practices were rooted in an interest in the formalist expression of light and aesthetics. The social aspect of a southern Italian “reality” could be seen as a secondary concern, although their understanding of a culture at once foreign and yet close to theirs aimed to establish a new sense of Italianità and arguably bridge the North-South divide. The idea of being from the North but “understanding” the South as an Italian was also the reason for a number of failed projects in the South.

Whose South?

In 1950, Luigi Crocenzi accompanied Elio Vittorini to Sicily with four others as part of a project to illustrate Conversazione in Sicilia with photographs. The novel had undergone six editions before it was published as a novel-in-photographs in 1953.¹⁰⁵ Vittorini had always wanted his novel to be illustrated, but due to Fascist criticism in 1942 he was forced to cancel a collaboration with Guttuso in 1943.¹⁰⁶ The photographic version, as seen earlier, was unfavorably reviewed because of the way the novel’s abstract content was weakened by the juxtaposition of realistic photographs. Vittorini, who was from working-class Sicilian origins, appeared to feel that Crocenzi was unable to understand the “concept” of Sicily. The idea that certain people were more culturally sensitive to the idea of the South than others created friction among a number of men of culture who failed to positively negotiate regionalism and a southern Italian identity.

One of the distinguishing characteristics between southern and northern Italian vernacular photographers, aside from a higher percentage of photographers from the North, was the fact that the southern Italians did not belong to camera clubs. This was because they did not exist in the South. Photographers from the South such as Caio Mario Garrubba, Mario Carbone, Franco Pinna, Vittorugo Contino, Cecilia Mangini, and Enzo Sellerio operated without the intellectual support of a group of like-minded amateurs. Critics would be hard-pressed to discover a specifically “southern” perspective of the South, in the same way as the Italianità of Italian humanist photography remains a moot point. However, the concept of the South and the deeply rooted idea that southerners might, for example, have a greater understanding of suffering and Catholic pathos, appeared to hold sway over Carlo Levi himself. For example, Levi’s dispute with the Florentine Fosco Maraini and his love of the Calabrian Mario Carbone resulted in a failed book and a successful painting. While the relative success and failure of the projects can be attributed to circumstances unrelated to regional provenance such as class-consciousness and personal factors, the underlying regionalism arguably needs to be taken into account as part of the construction of a history of humanist photography of the disputed concept of the South.

In 1952, Levi had been invited by his friend Diego De Donato, a Communist publisher from Bari, along with Fosco Maraini, a cosmopolitan anthropologist, novelist, documentary filmmaker, and photographer from Florence, to create a book that De Donato had provisionally titled Our South (Nostro Sud). The possessive pronoun “our” resembled Cesare Zavattini’s hubris in his project with Paul Strand seen in the introduction. Zavattini had titled their book My Italy (Italia Mia), perhaps echoing the journalist and politician Antonio Cederna’s founding of the nonprofit organization Italia Nostra in 1955, one of the first environmental associations aiming to protect and promote Italy’s historical, artistic, and natural heritage. However, Strand eventually titled his and Zavattini’s collaboration Un Paese, meaning “a village” but also “a country.”¹⁰⁷ In the case of De Donato’s project, the idea was similar to the Zavattini-Strand idea, which was taking place around the same time in the North: publish the work of a photographer with the words of an eminent intellectual. The three-week expedition, however, ended in disagreements over the three men’s visions and narratives of the South: Levi and De Donato were concerned with the political angle and were interested in an ethnological analysis of the territory; Maraini wanted to take a poetic view and include, among others, photographs of wild landscapes for their aesthetic value.¹⁰⁸ Maraini’s photographs that accentuated stereotypes such as gesturing southerners may have contributed to personal disagreements.

Maraini had belonged to the Second Futurism movement before moving to Asia just before the Second World War and was famous for his photobooks and documentary films on Tibet (Segreto Tibet, 1951) and photographs of naked pearl-divers in Japan from the early 1940s, which were published in L’isola delle pescatrici in 1960. He also joined La Bussola on his return to Italy after the war.¹⁰⁹ The dispute between Levi and Maraini was unsatisfactorily resolved thirty years later, when the book was published as a sociological research titled Peasant Civilisation (Civiltà contadina) in 1983. Too many badly reproduced and small-format photographs are accompanied by tedious statistics, geographical notes, or touristic remarks, evoking neither an ethnological study nor a cinematic-narrative one. Nostro Sud remained a failed neorealist dream, cancelled out by the political tensions and contrasting ideological facets that underlay an aesthetic vision. In an attempt to produce what he had intended to with a photographer who espoused his vision, Levi published a large-format hardbound photobook in 1959 with photographs by the Hungarian photographer and journalist Janòs Reismann.¹¹⁰ Levi persevered with his southern projects in the 1960s with the Italian Mario Carbone, a shy and mildly spoken photographer who was originally from Calabria. In 1960, Levi invited Carbone to return to the South, the poverty and desperation of which he had escaped in 1954.¹¹¹ Levi sought photographs of Materan scenes for a large-scale painting he had been commissioned by film director and novelist Mario Soldati, curator of Italia ‘61, a celebration of the centenary of Italian unification (Figures 3.14 and 3.15).

FIGURE 3.14 Mario Carbone, Lucania, 1960 © Mario Carbone.

FIGURE 3.15 Carlo Levi, Lucania ‘61, 1961, oil on canvas, 6 panels, 320 × 1850 cm, Palazzo Lanfranchi, Matera © Carlo Levi, Raffealla Acetoso, by SIAE 2015.

Soldati was in charge of organizing Italia ‘61 at the Palazzo delle esposizioni in Turin in which every region was represented by a different artist. The Lucanian people chose Levi as their representative, who used a number of Carbone’s photographs as the inspiration for large-scale paintings and an eighteen-meter long mural. Lucania ‘61 displayed the subaltern world of southern peasants, an exception in an exhibition where “Italy’s ‘rightful’ position within the powers of the Free Western World” prevailed.¹¹² Carbone frequented the same crowd as Levi in Rome, thanks to his friendship with Linuccia Saba—the daughter of the poet Umberto Saba and Levi’s erstwhile partner. He worked for a number of Communist documentary film production companies including the PCI-funded Studio unitelefilm as well as Mario Pannunzio’s renowned weekly, Il Mondo, where Levi first saw his photographs. Carbone only printed a few photographs for Levi in 1960, eventually printing the entire series for a book titled In Lucania con Carlo Levi with an essay by Levi in 1980. The accompanying captions by Gino Melchiorre reflect the bitter ironies of a region that in 1960 was still cut off from the rest of the nation. He cites excerpts from the papers at the time that clash sarcastically with the subjects of the photographs: “Productivity increased by 3.4% in Italy”; “In Milan 644,000 telephones: more than one phone for every three inhabitants.” Beneath Figure 3.14: “Carlo Ponti buys Paolina Bonaparte’s tiara for Sofia Loren” and on the next page “The daily news in Rome: Loren has been denied Paolina Bonaparte’s tiara.”¹¹³

Levi had wanted a photographer from the South “who understood the South.” Paradoxically Carbone observed that although he had been to Lucania to work on documentary films before his commission, his photographs of the South were not his best, perhaps due to an excess of nostalgia and relief at having left. The friendships and affections behind the projects discussed such as Conversazione in Sicilia, Nostro Sud, and Lucania ‘61 reveal a world in which intellectuals and photographers like Vittorini, Crocenzi, Maraini, Carbone, or Levi were engaged with the concept of the South in terms of their subjective understanding of class-consciousness and regional belonging. Behind this concept was a search for authenticity, for the representation of the “real” South, or the South that each man had experienced individually, seemingly as a utopia-dystopia, a good place and a bad place, or a place that could never adequately be represented.

Conclusion

The questions that concerned Italian photographers regarding the southern Italian peasant world were not those that concerned the Americans like Collins, Bischof, or Haas who were working for the American government and whose photographs related to economic and statistical quantifications about wealth and living conditions. Italian photographers were caught up in more complex discourse, aware of the potential power of Communist ideals, of Catholic beliefs, and of an ancient disappearing culture that was somehow connected to theirs. The medium penetrated unobtrusively into the lives of southern peasants, for example, capturing them performing magic rituals, entering into trances, or mining naked in Sicilian sulfur mines. These images were not those sought after by the PCI, where the worker, the fisher, or the miner represented, as in Guttuso’s paintings, the flexed, virile salute of a dawning Communist revolution. Humanist photographs of the South participate in a discourse in which the poignant, exotic, and fragile Otherness of a culture that held pre-Christian, quasi-pagan, religious beliefs exploded the notion of what it meant to be Italian. Furthermore, the Communist contempt for the “irrational” world of the peasants who needed emancipation from their “backward” ways of life was not necessarily the ideological starting point of photographers who, at times, came from Northern bourgeois backgrounds. Like documentary films, photographs recorded a culture that had been going on undisturbed for millennia, which began to disappear with the financial boom and the dawn of neoliberalism, creating a nostalgia for something that few people even knew existed. The photographic negotiation of a southern “Other” and an authentic “Us” remained caught in a web of projections, stereotypes, and discoveries that continuously sought to find the “real” South.

Italian humanist photographers, who fought to be considered on a par with the artistic and cultural movements of the 1950s but not as part of the neorealist movement, have yet to achieve that position. Histories of photography in the South continue to place huge importance on foreign figures such as Cartier-Bresson and Paul Strand, in the scramble to validate Italian photography posthumously, endorsing decades of intellectual snobbery toward photography as “not quite art.” This contributes to maintaining Italian photographers in the margins, in a mise en abyme, like the disempowered subjects of their photographs. Perhaps the fact that Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le Quattro volte, a silent documentary film about a time-worn peasant tradition in Calabria, won the Best European Film award at Cannes in 2010 can be considered a sign that, sixty years after they were taken, these photographs are beginning to acquire new significance.