Gagliano

Gagliano may refer to:

Places

See also

Aglianico

Aglianico (pronounced [aʎˈʎaːniko], roughly "ahl-YAH-nee-koe") is a black grape grown in the southern regions of Italy, mostly Basilicata and Campania.

The vine originated in Greece and was brought to the south of Italy by Greek settlers. The name may be a corruption of vitis hellenica, Latin for "Greek vine." Another etymology posits a corruption of Apulianicum, the Latin name for the whole of southern Italy in the time of ancient Rome. During this period, it was the principal grape of the famous Falernian wine, the Roman equivalent of a first-growth wine today.

Oenologist Denis Dubourdieu has said "Aglianico is probably the grape with the longest consumer history of all."

History

The vine is believed to have first been cultivated in Greece by the Phoceans from an ancestral vine that ampelographers have not yet identified. From Greece it was brought into Italy by settlers at Cumae, near modern-day Pozzuoli, and from there spread to various points in the regions of Campania and Basilicata. While still grown in Italy, the original Greek plantings seem to have disappeared. In ancient Rome, the grape was the principal component of the world's earliest first-growth wine, Falernian. Along with a white grape known as Greco (today grown as Greco di Tufo), the grape was commented on by Pliny the Elder, the maker of some of the highest-ranked wines in Roman times.

Christ Stopped at Eboli

Christ Stopped at Eboli (Italian: Cristo si è fermato a Eboli) is a memoir by Carlo Levi, published in 1945, giving an account of his exile from 1935-1936 to Grassano and Aliano, remote towns in southern Italy, in the region of Lucania which is known today as Basilicata. In the book he gives Aliano the invented name 'Gagliano'.

"The title of the book comes from an expression by the people of 'Gagliano' who say of themselves, 'Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli' which means, in effect, that they feel they have been bypassed by Christianity, by morality, by history itself—that they have somehow been excluded from the full human experience." Levi explained that Eboli, a location in the region of Campania to the west near the seacoast, is where the road and railway to Basilicata branched away from the coastal north-south routes.

Background

Carlo Levi was a doctor, writer and painter, a native of Turin. In 1935, Levi's anti-fascist beliefs and activism led to his banishment by Benito Mussolini's fascist government to a period of internal exile in a remote region of southern Italy. Despite his status as a political exile Levi was welcomed with open arms, for the people of this area were naturally gracious hosts. His book, Christ Stopped At Eboli, focuses on his year in the villages of the Lucania region and the people he encountered there.