To the peasants of Lucania Rome means very little; it is the capital of the gentry, the center of a foreign and hostile world. Naples has more right to be their capital, and in some ways it is; it is the capital of poverty. Those who live there have pale faces and feverish eyes; on sweltering summer days you can see half-dressed women asleep at tables, through the open doors of the houses of the poor along the steep alleys off the Toledo. But at Naples, for a long time, there has been no king, and the peasants go there only to embark for other shores. The Kingdom of Naples has perished, and the kingdom of the hopelessly poor is not of this world. Their other world is America. Even America, to the peasants, has a dual nature. It is a land where a man goes to work, where he toils and sweats for his daily bread, where he lays aside a little money only at the cost of endless hardship and privation, where he can die and no one will remember him. At the same time, and with no contradiction in terms, it is an earthly paradise and the promised land.
Yes, New York, rather than Rome or Naples, would be the real capital of the peasants of Lucania.
Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, 1947