By Thomas Harrington at Brownstone dot org.

When persecuting his domestic political opponents, Mussolini frequently did so in what by today's dictatorial standards was a surprising, genteel manner. He would send them to live in remote villages far from their homes, often in the poverty-stricken center and south of Italy.

There, while constrained by daily check-ins with the police, and a mostly enforced ban on leaving the village, they were - depending on the humors of the local podestà - often otherwise free to live their lives, receive family visits, and in some cases, bring along their wives and young children to share in the experience.

One such confinee, as such people were called, was the Turin-born physician, painter, political activist, and writer Carlo Levi, who in 1935 was sent to the village of Aliano in the province of Matera, part of a larger historic region of Lucania, known for extreme poverty during its long history of violent resistance to Bourbon and, after 1860, when the Italian government attempted to impose their control on the territory.

Nine years later, as German troops roamed the streets of a suddenly post-Mussolini Florence looking to detain and torture political dissidents much like him, a hiding Levi produced a lightly fictionalized account of his time in Aliano. Eighty years after its publication, that book, Christ Stopped in Eboli (Cristo si è fermato a Eboli), is still widely viewed as a classic work of contemporary Italian and European literature.

In addition to its often stunningly beautiful prose, the key to its success lies, in my view, in the way that Levi flips the script on the assumptions underlying the authoritarian social order forged by Mussolini in the years after his 1922 March on Rome.

The great majority of the confinees in Mussolini's Italy were, like Levi, products of the country's industrialized and presumptively more sophisticated urban north. In exiling them to the "savage" south away, in the case of the intellectuals from their cafés and galleries, and in the case of the union leaders and labor agitators, from their workers' clubs and meetings, Mussolini sought to psychologically break them.

He was saying to them in effect, "Think you have a better idea of how to run the country? Great, go see how that works out with the illiterate and violent peasants of the mezzogiorno."

Levi, however, subverted the plan by deploying one of the weapons that ruling authoritarians most fear: empathy. While never resorting to condescension, nor denying his own identity and social extraction, he simply regarded his new neighbors with an equanimous and loving gaze, viewing them on their terms, and in the light of the historical and geographical realities that had shaped their destinies.

He had been sent to one of the poorest places in Europe, one where, as the title of the book suggests, not even the basic ideas and values of Western culture had supposedly ever penetrated, and he found not the expected deplorables, but imperfect people like those up north shaped, however, by a different and quite rationally coherent set of civilizational imperatives.

When a book moves me deeply, I often seek to visit the places portrayed in its pages. I recently had the good fortune of spending an afternoon rambling around the streets of Aliano, visiting houses where Levi lived during his confinement, sitting in the small square where he listened to Fascist harangues with his fellow villagers, and gazing out on the stark and steep clay mountainsides he rendered so beautifully in his paintings and by way of words in the book.

I finished up with a visit to the graveyard located on a hill above the main part of the town, where he would seek relief from the summer heat by lying down in half-dug graves and would request to be buried upon his death in 1975.

As I moved toward the gates of this cemetery in this still forgotten and still quite poor corner of Europe, filled according to most available statistical measure...