Carlo Levi a San Costantino Albanese

This volume centres around a day in December 1974 in San Costantino Albanese, and the photographic and pictorial traces it left behind. The documents presented here – four photographs of Carlo Levi dining and socialising in the company of local politicians and members of the community, and of a mural by Levi painted that evening – are stored, respectively, in the private collection which is the result of Nicola Scaldaferriʼs research and on a wall in the former Pro Loco of San Costantino Albanese. San Costantino Albanese is a small town in a remote mountainous area of Basilicata called Val Sarmento. It was settled during the sixteenth century by a community of Albanian refugees known as Arbëreshë, as a result of the Ottoman invasion of the Balkans. The community, like that of its neighbour San Paolo Albanese, is part of the Italo-Albanian Byzantine Catholic church and an early-modern form of the Albanian language is spoken in both villages. It becomes clear, through the essays in this volume, that four photographs from a private collection and a mural can generate a multitude of reflections that go beyond the time, place and people depicted in them.