Where it was filmed 'Christ Stopped at Eboli'

“Down to this dark land, without sin and without redemption, where evil is not moral, but is an earthly grief, that is always present inside things, Christ did not descend. Christ stopped at Eboli.”

Carlo Levi

In Levi’s eyes, Eboli represented the geographical and historical limit of a world, there where the road and railway to Basilicata branched away from the coastal north-south routes. The station of Eboli in the early scenes of the film was actually shot at the station of Gravina in Puglia (province of Bari).

To reach Aliano, his place of exile, the writer and doctor from Turin (Gian Maria Volonté) had to cross an area of rocky mountains, the Calanchi. However, the Gagliano (as it would have been pronounced with the local accent) of Levi’s memoir no longer exists. Modernity has brought several changes (street lights and modern buildings) so the choice of shooting location fell on Craco (province of Matera). The stone houses, limestone rock, steep and narrow alleyways and sheer staircases, dominated by a Norman tower and 12th century castle, provided the perfect setting for a village of the 1930s bypassed by civilization. Abandoned in the early 1960s following a landslide, the atmosphere in Craco is that of another time. Here, the widow’s house where Levi spent the first days of his confinement was constructed on the edge of the rubble. The wide view over the valley is from Craco, as is the small lake where the two exiles took turns to eat lunch, being forbidden to communicate with each other.

Another important location was Guardia Perticara (province of Potenza) used for the square with the town hall, the post office, the old church of Gagliano where Christmas eve is celebrated and where Levi meets the magistrate.

Levi’s second house, where he rediscovered his passion for painting and sporadically received a patient or two, is in Aliano.

Although forbidden to exercise his profession, Levi was unable to refuse the desperate plea for help from a peasant: that location was Le Monacelle, an ancient farmhouse on the outskirts of the rural hamlet of La Martella, municipality of Matera. In one of the most dramatic scenes of the entire film, the peasant, whom Levi is unable to help, dies and is mourned by two sisters from Pisticci.

Meanwhile the rough and ready bar where the peasants met to drink wine, sing and play tarantelle, was created from an underground cave dug out near the De Laurentis farmhouse in Murgia di Santeramo (province of Bari).