Lodovico Alessandri remembers the first time he saw the town of Aliano, in 1994. He was “nauseated,” he says, by what seemed to him “a completely broken country,” a decaying hilltop town in a rural area in the instep of Italy’s boot. Fifty-nine years before, the Piedmontese intellectual and artist Carlo Levi had had a similar reaction: “Everything was unpleasant to me,” he wrote. In 1935, Levi was arrested when he reached the region, Basilicata (called Lucania, at the time). He would be confined in Aliano for his anti-fascist ideas,…
