Three multidisciplinary essays—from
cultural
anthropology to
photography
analysis—based on visual archives documenting the visit of writer, painter
and politician Carlo Levi to an Albanian community in Southern Italy (second
volume in the series “Archivi della Basilicata”).
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
Scaldaferri's 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.
