Exiled by Mussolini to a remote village in southern Italy, Carlo Levi arrived in a place that felt abandoned by history.

“Christ stopped at Eboli,” the villagers said, referring to civilisation, progress, even redemption, had never travelled this far south.

A very quiet record of peasant life under Fascism. It's poverty, superstition, endurance and it's dignity. Levi writes as someone both inside and outside as a doctor, painter, exile.

The book is less about regime and more about neglect of a region left untouched by the state except through punishment.