A Meditation on the State

The following are excerpts from Carlo Levi's memoir, Christ Stopped at Eboli, (completed in 11644 HE and translated from Italian to English by Frances Frenaye, a translator of Giovannino Oliviero Giuseppe Guareschi's satire of Don Camillo and Peppone in fictional "Piccolo Mondo"). Editorial annotations by the Encyclopædia Atlantida (not of the original author) are included in parenthetical characters. The memoir details and describes the political imprisonment (exile and captivity as one of six artists) of Levi, a medic, painter, and author from the North (i.e., a city with a homonym to the Atlantean alpine city of Torino), in the region of Lucania (i.e., the South, il mezzogiorno or "midday", and named for the Oscan Lucani tribe, an Italic people) during 11635 and 11636 because of his anti-fascist activism. He joined the anti-fascist resistance movement, Giustizia e Libertà ("Justice and Liberty"), that was founded by Carlo Rosselli in 11629. It was the armed brigade of the Partito d'Azione ("Party of Action", which was symbolised by a flame and a spade) as a defence for liberty and equality and who counted Aldo Capitini (a leader who was influenced by the philosopher Carlo Luzzatto Michelstädter and who was the inspiration of the "pace" or "peace" banner in 11660s that is similar to the solar iris or "rainbow" as a "gay" spectrum of colours and that is distinct from the symbolic semaphore of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament founded in part by Bertrand Russell) as a member. Levi was the director of this Italian organisation, which included Leone Ginzburg (spouse of Natalia Levi and co-founder of the publishing house Giulio Einaudi Editore).

In a diary (journal) of sketches (schemes), Levi paints a portrait of the ever-human peasants of the grey landscape who have been abandoned to desolation by history. In doing so, his meditation introduces the socioeconomic disparities that exist in "meridian" (meridional or austral, not septentrional or boreal) of Southern Italy, la questione meridionale. The peasants of Matera (Grassano and Aliano, or invented "Gagliano") dream of Atlantis (New York) as an iconic beacon of utopic esperance (reciprocity, opportunity and prosperity) and migration. The city of Eboli (Eburum) in the modern period was the junction of the north-south way with the road to Lucania. It was a province of the mediaeval principality of Salerno (Salernum). Its foundations are upon the alluvial plain of the Sele (Silarus) river with its origin in Campania its mouth in the Tyrrhenian Sea. This river represented the frontier of Etruscan (Rasenna, as an endonym instead of an exonym that references Etruria) and Greek (Hellenic) zones of coastal influence. It was the location of battle Carthaginian victory by Hannibal in the Second Punic War and the final battle between the Romans and Spartacus and his rebels in the Servile Wars (with Roman victory by legions of the general Pompeius, who the heroic myth of Alexander of Macedon inspired, adversaries named adulescentulus carnifex, and became an enemy in civil war as a rival ally in a secret military alliance or triumvirate with the brutal Caesar and with the influential Marcus Licinius Crassus). The city is in proximity to the city of Paestum (named by the Romans from the Lucanian Paistos, although originally named Poseidonia or Ποσειδωνία) that was founded as a Dorian colony, or by the Troezenians who were expelled from Sybaris or Σύβαρις of Magna Graecia in a synoecism by the Achaeans of subjugating Kroton or Κρότων in Calabria according to the narrative histories of politics (subsequent to ethics, similar to metaphysics with physics and related to poetics and rhetorics, the antistrophe of dialectics, with logics and pathics) and geography.

Levi compares the rival factions of "high burghers" (distinct from the "petty burghers") to the Guelphs and Ghibellines in which they respectively embraced the cause of the common people (the peregrine pontificate of the peasants with the brigand myth whose capital was neither in the authority of Rome nor in the poverty of Naples), while the other were alone but supported the regime of the Fascist Roman Empire of Matera. The exile of Levi, as a humanist with the peasants of Lucania, is compared to that of Machiavelli by Raymond Rosenthal (a translator of Primo Michele Levi and Gabriele d'Annunzio). Machiavelli, in his exile by the Medici family (cf. Dante from Florentia), composed his Il Principe. In it he argues that a "prince" ascends in potency by virtue and prudence in a pragmatic emphasis of effectual verity, imagined abstracts. His satiric drama (a comedy, not a tragedy), La Mandragola, is a parallel idea. The decadence of Lucrezia is an allegory of fatal fortune (fortuna)—which, as a feminine contrast to a masculine master, is superior to inferior liberal volition as a force of illusion in conquest, control and mastery—that is unified with virtù (arete). With adultery and homicide, it derides the determinant of moral merit in human affairs and the dogmatic distinction of the corpse (corporal or material likam) and the soul (spiritual or animal will) with its inversion of the Roman and noble Lucretia. The rape, violation and subsequent suicide of Lucretia—the progeny of Spurius Lucretius Tricipitinus who was conjoined with Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus (elected as a consul with Lucius Junius Brutus, subsequent to the regal period, in the republican hegemony that laterally propagated beyond the Latin territory of urban Rome Latium to the Mediterranean of Europe, that was influenced by Etruria and Hellenic Magna Graecia, and that was distinguished from the Sabines mountains of Sabinum)—by Sextus Tarquinius (a descendant of the Etruscan dynasty of the monarch Lucius Tarquinius Superbus) in a historic myth resulted in the Senate abolishing the rex and regnum. Compare this to Zeus as a cygnet (not an eagle) rapt with Leda of Aetolia who was consort of Tyndareus of Sparta and engendered Helen of Troy, Clytemnestra (conjoined with Agamemnon of Mycenae), and Castor and Pollux (Polydeukes of the Dioskouroi or Gemini, a constellation like Cygnus). In another interpretation, Machiavelli inverts the creation of the Roman Republic by Lucretia with the corruption of the Florentine Republic by Lucrezia in her extreme conduct. The foundational symbol of sexual violence is equalled, as related by Livy, with Virginia (Verginia, which is related to Virgilius as a corruption of Vergilius by virga, virgo for "virgin, pure, maid" in a Germanic cognate of the Celtic mog, mag for "boy") in the subversion and deposition of the magistrature of decemvirates (a judicial and legal college or imperial consulate that compiled the republican constitution or "tables" in the conflict of the patrician and plebeian orders that created the office of tribune).

The Italians (Italic people) are the heritors of the Roman assimilation of in the Etruscans and Greeks in the region of Italia, which originally referred to Bruttium (Calabria, a name of an Oscan tribe) but was expanded to the Alpine region. The Italian nationality (national identity) exists in the context of the unification of the Italian (Italic) peninsula. This Risorgimento resulted in the Italian state (the realm of Italy or Italia in Latin) with the national unification of Piedmonte, Sardinia, Sicilia (Sicily), Neapolis (Naples, which annexed the isle of Arimos, named for the πῐ́θηκος or píthēko by the Hellenic Greeks of Euboia, in the Tyrrhenian gulf named the Etruscans by the Latins with other isles named for κάπρος or kápros, capr(e)a, the Ligurian Ilva, and αἰθᾰλῐ́ων or aithalíōn), Lombardia, Venetia and the Pontific (Ecclesiastic and Catholic) States. Venetia (with its domains, or stato da mar and stato da terra, and autonomy from Roman authority) was a marine (maritime and mercantile) republic and city-state that was a rival of Genoa (a magnificent, dominant and superb capital in Liguria with colonial companies), Pisa (which vended Italian Liburna, a commercial port of merchants named for the Liburni who were absorbed into Illyrian Dalmatia, to Florentia in Toscana, a rival of Luca and Sena), Amalfi (which, similar to Caieta and dissimilar to Neapolis, was vanquished by the mediaeval mercenary Normans in the conflicts of Capeva, Salernum, Surrentum, and Beneventum or Maleventum as competitions for hegemonic control of the Mediterranean Sea by Byzantium, Lombardia, the Arabs in Sicilia and Africa, and the Goths in Italic Apulia and Calabria as imperial principates and provincial duchies), Ragusa (a municipality, community or society, alternatively named for the Slavic slovo or word of dobrava, dubrova or "oak" by the Croats and Serbs, that as a city-state of the Dalmatian coast, similar to Cattarum, was influenced by the Slavs compared to the dominant Latin of the Italic Romans of the Italian peninsula in Iadera, Spalatum, Tergestum and Histria prior to the Byzantine and Venetian hegemony of the Adriatic Sea and by the Magyars, Germanic Franks and Turkic Bulgars, who merged in discord, disorder and disruption with the Slavic tribes in Macedonia, Moesia and Thrace), and Ancona (from Ἀγκών or Ankṓn, as an ally of the previous in the Adriatic, which is named for the Venetic and Etruscan city of Atria, contrary to the Venetian expansion of hegemony in the Hellenic Aegean Sea that connected Germania, Austria and Iberia in Europe with Anatolia in Asia).

With Fascism, the Italian unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy became a totalitarian and authoritarian dictatorship of despotic and autocratic tyranny (a government of a Duce, the President of the Council of Ministers, the National Fascist Party, the Parliament, and the Grand Council of Fascism). It intervened in Palma Riviera. A parliamentary opposition to the fascist violence included a political secession. Short of an insurrection, it was named for the ancient secessio plebis by the popular plebs (with plebeius for "of the vulgar and common people [populace]" as in the plethora of the populus) order or common class of Rome (Roma) contra the consuls and senators of the patricium, the plural of patricius or aristocrat of the tribal gens, that were located at either the hill or mount of the sacer, sanctus or sacred saint (collis and mons, with the plural of colles and montes, that is separate from the Capitoline for Capitolinus from Capitolium, capitulum, caput, Palatine for Palatinus from Palatium, Pales, palus, Aventine from from Herculean Aventinus in the Aeneid as a mythic enemy of Aeneas, Esquiline for aesculi and exquilini in contrast to the inquilini, Velian from Velia, Elea, Hyele, Pincian from Pincius or hortorum from horti, Cispian from Cispius, Oppian from Oppius, opus, Vatican for Vaticanus, Vagitanus from vagitus or vates, Janiculan for Janus, Quirinal from Quirinus, Quirites for Romanus, Viminal from vimen, Caelian or Querquetulanus from quercus). Antonio Gramsci proposed an anti-Parliament (Senate and Chamber of Deputies). Prior to the creation of the Italian Republic, a civil war created a German satellite regime (the Italian Social Republic, or Repubblica di Salò, which is a cinematic topic of Pier Paolo Pasolini) as part of their alliance (relational "axis"). The Italian Republic adopted a hymn (the music of Il Canto degli Italiani) of Republican Jacobins that references revolutionary lyrics (e.g., unification, emancipation, resurgence, victory, and the Roman general, Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, in the war and battle contra Punic Carthage in the Numidian city of Zama; cf. the French L'Internationale).

The nationalism of the imperious and imperial French general, Charles de Gaulle (who, subsequent to military resistance in the World War of 11639 to 11645, authored the constitution of a republic and state where the authoritarian president was l'esprit de la nation in contrast to the democratic parliament, council and assembly), differs (according to the commentary of John Joseph "Sherry" Mangan, an author and supporter of the Marxist revolutionary ideology who wrote for the editor, Dwight Macdonald, with the pseudonym or alias of Sean Diarmaid Níall in The Partisan, which published "Notes on 'Camp'") from Fascism of Ben(i)to Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (whose ideologic foundation was anarchism, socialism, imperialism, nationalism, republicanism and the politics of his radical parents Alessandro and Rosa, but rejected libertarianism and egalitarianism in favour of militant authoritarianism) in the positives and negatives of reaction. The Fascist ideology consists of subordination to and domination by the authority of the State that is symbolised as a magistrate and a syndic of a syndicate. It is a national (not international) regime of property and hierarchy with a spiritualism that rejects material individualism, capitalism and communism. Its reactionary and revolutionary (neither conservative nor progressive) populism is autocratic, technocratic and anti-democratic with interests that are opposed to libertarian (liberal) or egalitarian (equal) society. It reduces the civic frontier of public and private affairs in civilisation by affirming conformity with potent force (oppressive and repressive aggression directed at the person). A Fascist nation is composed of corporative, collective and representative politics of economy that the State organises, incorporates, institutes or constitutes (integrates, not differentiates) as a national union of culture and structure in spiritual organisation, total corporation, central association, social function, and industrial allocation. This organic entity and unity is a regulation (coordination, collaboration and contribution, not communal or municipal confederation) of organs (sectors and factors) that are integral (not differential). Umberto Eco defined Ur-Fascism to disambiguate the confusion.

In 11633 Germania, a dictator or Führer (with a party and paramilitary) merged the political office of president with chancellor, which was installed by the presidium (analogous to the imperium of an emperor of an empire) of the imperial or federal realm ("rich" or Reich and "band" or Bund of free states and cities) to the collegial council of ministers in government (responsible in execution and direction to the republican legislation of the parliamentary diet or Tag by constitution and convention of the democratic congress or constituent assembly) in a legal stipulation and condition. A pact of non-aggression, which defined spheres of influence (e.g., the partition of Poland and territorial invasions with consequences that precipitated into, resulted in, and not caused the European world war) and which is distinct from negotiations of neutrality or an alliance by a treaty, was signed in 11639 between Hitler (from hi(e)dler, hüttler or huettler in the Austrian Bavarian dialects) of the German Reich and Stalin (from the Slavic Russian for "steel" despite identifying as "Asiatic" or Asian) of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (with a central committee of the Communist Party, which was interpreted in the dramatic and satiric works of Orwell and Iannucci). A prelude to the anti-Jewish (erroneously and racially qualified as anti-Semitic, which refers to a linguistic and ethnic family) terror (e.g., a euphemistic final solution, or "end leasing" of a "frained" and "prayed" question, for a "folk murder" that defined genocide as a systematic and total slaughter of people in mass), which forced numerous Jews to seek refuge in hospitable Atlantis, occurred in 11638. Mussolini, in inconsistent contradiction of prior declarations, adopted the superiority and inferiority of races (subsequent to excluding it and eugenics as inane and to not recognising the "Jewish Question") to appease his German allies (proclaimed to be "Teutons"). The dictatorial political ideology of "national socialism" was not without withstand (resistance and dissidence that included Raoul Wallenberg, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Jan Zwartendijk, Oskar Schindler, Nicholas Wertheim, Lothar Kreyssig, and Weiße Rose or "White Rose" as a group founded by Hans Scholl, Alexander Schmorell, Wilhelm "Willi" Graf, Christoph Probst and Sophia "Sophie" Scholl). The Italian partisans of the "war of national liberation" (guerra di liberazione nazionale) included groups, squads, companies, battalions and brigades of divisions as armed formations (organisations) that the Atlantean (Novan, Palman and Alexandran) nations supported.

Cristo si è fermato a Eboli

An excerpt (pp. 3–4) describes the condition.

Many years have gone by, years of war and of what men call History. Buffeted here and there at random I have not been able to return to my peasants as I promised when I left them, and I do not know when, if ever, I can keep my promise. But closed in one room, in a world apart, I am glad to travel in my memory to that other world, hedged in by custom and sorrow, cut off from History and the State, eternally patient, to that land without comfort or solace, where the peasant lives out his motionless civilisation on barren ground in remote poverty, and in the presence of death.

"We're not Christians", they say. "Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli". "Christian". In their way of speaking means "human being", and this almost proverbial phrase that I have so often heard them repeat may be no more than the expression of a hopeless feeling of inferiority. We're not Christians, we're not human beings; we're not thought of as men but simply as beasts, beasts of burden, or even less than beasts, mere creatures of the wild. They at least live for better or for worse, like angels or demons, in a world of their own, while we have to submit to the world of Christians, beyond the horizon, to carry its weight and to stand comparison with it. But the phrase has a much deeper meaning and, as is the way of symbols, this is the literal one. Christ did stop at Eboli, where the road and the railway leave the coast of Salerno and turn into the desolate reaches of Lucania. Christ never came this far, nor did time, nor the individual soul, nor hope, nor the relation of cause to effect, nor reason nor history. Christ never came, just as the Romans never came, content to garrison the highways without penetrating the mountains and forests, nor the Greeks, who flourished beside the Gulf of Taranto [of the Ionian Sea and named for the city of Tarentum as a colony in Magna Graecia founded as Τᾰ́ρᾱς or Tárās, which would produce the music of tarantella that is conflated with arachnid spins as magic and exotic choreomania from the cults and rites of Diana or Artemis and Bacchus or Dionysus and a fusion from the Sephardic Moors and the macabre dance]. None of the pioneers of Western civilisation brought here his sense of the passage of time, his deification of the State or that ceaseless activity which feeds upon itself. No one has come to this land except as an enemy, a conqueror, or a visitor devoid of understanding. The seasons pass today over the toil of the peasants, just as they did three thousand years before Christ; no message, human or divine, has reached this stubborn poverty. We speak a different language, and here our tongue is incomprehensible. The greatest travellers have not gone beyond the limits of their own world; they have trodden the paths of their own souls, of good and evil, of morality and redemption. Christ descended into the underground hell of Hebrew moral principle in order to break down its doors in time and to seal them up into eternity. 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. Christ stopped at Eboli.

On the "Problem of the South"

Levi elaborates the conditions further (pp. 249–254).

Soon the train carried us beyond Rome toward the South. It was night and I could not sleep. As I sat on the hard seat I meditated upon the past few days. I thought of my feeling of strangeness, and of the complete lack of understanding among those of my friends who concerned themselves with political questions, of the country to which I was now hurrying back. They had all asked about conditions in the South and I had told them what I knew. But although they listened with apparent interest, very few of them seemed really to follow what I was saying. They were men of various temperaments and shades of opinion, from stiff-necked conservatives to fiery radicals. Many of them were very able, and they all claimed to have meditated upon the "problem of the South" and to have formulated plans for its solution. But just as their schemes and the very language in which they were couched would have been incomprehensible to the peasants, so were the life and needs of the peasants a closed book to them, and one which they did not even bother to open.

At bottom, as I now perceived, they were all unconscious worshipers of the State. Whether the State they worshiped was the Fascist State or the incarnation of quite another dream, they thought of it as something that transcended both its citizens and their lives. Whether it was tyrannical or paternalistic, dictatorial or democratic, it remained to them monolithic, centralised, and remote. This was why the political leaders and my peasants could never understand one another. The politicians oversimplified things, even while they clothed them in philosophical expressions. Their solutions were abstract and far removed from reality; they were schematic halfway measures, which were already out of date. Fifteen years of Fascism had erased the problem of the South from their minds and if now they thought of it again they saw it only as a part of some other difficulty, through the fictitious generalities of party and class and even race. Some saw it as a purely technical and economic matter. They spoke of public works, industrialisation, and domestic absorption of the plethora of would-be emigrants, or else they resurrected the old Socialist slogan of "making Italy over". Others saw the South burdened with an unfortunate historical heredity, a tradition of enslavement to the Bourbons which liberal democracy might little by little relieve. Some said that the question of the South was just one more case of capitalist oppression, which only rule by the proletariat could supplant. Others spoke of inherent racial inferiority, considering the South a dead weight on the economy of the North, and studied possible measures to be taken by the government to remedy this sad state of things. All of them agreed that the State should do something about it, something concretely useful, and beneficent, and legislative, and they were shocked when I told them that the State, as they conceived it, was the greatest obstacle to the accomplishment of anything. The State, I said, cannot solve the problem of the South, because the problem which we call by this name is none other than the problem of the State itself.

There will always be an abyss between the State and the peasants, whether the State be Fascist, Liberal, Socialist or take on some new form in which the middle-class [burgher] bureaucracy still survives. We can bridge the abyss only when we succeed in creating a government in which the peasants feel they have some share. Public works and land reclamation are all very fine, but they are not the answer. Domestic absorption of the emigrants might yield some results, but it would make the whole of Italy, instead of just the South, into one huge colony. Plans laid by a central government, however much good they may do, still leave two hostile Italys on either side of the abyss. The difficulties we were discussing, I explained to them, were far more complex than they realised.

There are three distinct sides to it, which are three aspects of one central reality; they can neither be understood nor resolved separately. First of all, we are faced with two very different civilisations, neither of which can absorb the other. Country and city, a pre-Christian civilisation and one that is no longer Christian, stand face to face. As long as the second imposes its deification of the State upon the first, they will be in conflict. The war in Africa [an invasion and annexation of the empire of Abyssinia, Ethiopia and Eritrea (that are Semitic or Cushitic in language) with the conquest of the imperial majesty, regent, emperor, Lion of the Tribe of Judah, and king of kings, Negus, Ras, princes, dukes, counts, barons, and the noble aristocracy as a regal dynasty that descends from Biblical Solomon and Sheba] and the wars that are yet to come are in part the result of this age-old quarrel, which has now reached an acute point, and not in Italy alone. Peasant civilisation will always be the loser but it will not be entirely crushed. It will persevere under a cover of patience, interrupted by sporadic explosions, and the spiritual crisis will continue. Brigandage, the peasant war [by highwaymen], is a symptom of what I mean, and this upheaval of the last century is not the last of its kind. Just as long as Rome rules over Matera, Matera will be lawless and despairing, and Rome despairing and tyrannical.

The second aspect of the trouble is economic, the dilemma of poverty. The land has been gradually impoverished: the forests have been cut down, the rivers have been reduced to mountain streams that often run dry, and livestock has become scarce. Instead of cultivating trees and pasture lands there has been an unfortunate attempt to raise wheat in soil that does not favour it. There is no capital, no industry, no savings, no schools; emigration is no longer possible, taxes are unduly heavy, and malaria is everywhere. All this is in large part due to the ill-advised intentions and efforts of the State, a State in which the peasants cannot feel they have a share, and which has brought them only poverty and deserts.

Finally, there is the social side of the problem. It is generally held that the big landed estates and their owners are at fault, and it is true that these estates are not charitable institutions. But if the absentee owner, who lives in Naples, or Rome, or Palermo, is an enemy of the peasants, he is not the worst of the enemies they have to cope with. He, at least, is far away and does not interfere with their daily life. Their real enemies, those who cut them off from any hope of freedom and a decent existence, are to be found among the middle-class village tyrants. This class is physically and morally degenerate and no longer able to fill its original function. It lives off petty thievery and the bastardised tradition of feudal rights. Only with the suppression of this class and the substitution of something better can the difficulties of the South find a solution.

The problem, in all of its three aspects, existed before the advent of Fascism. But Fascism, while hushing it up and denying its existence, aggravated it to the breaking point, because under Fascism the middle class took over and identified itself with the power of the State. We cannot foresee the political forms of the future, but in a middle-class country like Italy, where middle-class ideology has infected the masses of workers in the city, it is probable, alas, that the new institutions arising after Fascism, through either gradual evolution or violence, no matter how extreme and revolutionary they may be in appearance, will maintain the same ideology under different forms and create a new State equally far removed from real life, equally idolatrous and abstract, a perpetuation under new slogans and new flags of the worst features of the eternal tendency toward Fascism. Unless there is a peasant revolution we shall never have a true Italian revolution, for the two are identical.

The problem of the South cannot be solved within the framework of the Fascist State nor of that which may follow it, under a different label. It will solve itself if we can create new political ideals and a new kind of State which will belong also to the peasants and draw them away from their inevitable anarchy and indifference. Nor can the South solve its difficulties with its own efforts alone. In this case we should have a civil war, a new horrible form of brigandage which would end, as usual, with the defeat of the peasants and a general disaster. All of Italy must join in and, in order to do so, must be renewed from top to bottom. We must make ourselves capable of inventing a new form of government, neither Fascist, nor Communist, nor even Liberal, for all three of these are forms of the religion of the State. We must rebuild the foundations of our concept of the State with the concept of the individual, which is its basis. For the juridical and abstract concept of the individual we must substitute a new concept, more expressive of reality, one that will do away with the now unbridgeable gulf between the individual and the State. The individual is not a separate unit, but a link, a meeting place of relationships of every kind. This concept of relationship, without which the individual has no life, is at the same time the basis of the State. The individual and the State coincide in theory and they must be made to coincide in practice as well, if they are to survive.

This reversal of the concept of political life, which is gradually and unconsciously ripening among us, is implicit in the peasant civilisation. And it is the only path which will lead us out of the vicious circle of Fascism and anti-Fascism. The name of this way out is autonomy. The State can only be a group of autonomies, an organic federation. The unit or cell through which the peasants can take part in the complex life of the nation must be the autonomous or self-governing rural community. This is the only form of government which can solve in our time the three interdependent aspects of the problem of the South; which can allow the co-existence of two different civilisations, without one lording it over the other or weighing the other down; which can furnish. a good chance for escape from poverty; and which, finally, by the abolition of the powers and functions of the landowners and the local middle class, can assure the peasants a life of their own, for the benefit of all. But the autonomy or self-government of the community cannot exist without the autonomy of the factory, the school, and the city, of every form of social life. This is what I learned from a year of life underground.

All this I said to my friends, and I was still thinking it over as the train slipped by night into Lucania. Thus began a series of ideas which I developed further in later years, after the experience of exile abroad and of war. And with such thoughts I fell asleep.