In 1935, Carlo Levi was exiled to the desolate Italian town of Lucania, a punishment for his opposition to Mussolini's Ethiopian war. While there, Levi reflected on the harsh landscape and its inhabitants, peasants who lived the same lives their ancestors had, constantly fearing black magic and the near presence of death. Part sociological study, part travel memoir, this is an eloquent, starkly beautiful account of a place and a people living outside the boundaries of progress and time.