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This book tells about Atayal: they were taiwanese aborigines that live in a mountain region in North Eastern Taiwan.

“Atayal” literally means genuine person or brave man.

These populations, heirs of ancient cultural traditions, have lived at the outskirts of developing Taiwan, and Governments often considered them as “unproductive communities”. Living in ignorance and misery, they lost many of them ancient traditions.

"When I saw these photos for the first time I immediately thought how the mountains of Atayal and their character are similar to landscape and people of a region in Italy: that’s Basilicata. It’s a small mountain region in south Italy, poor, remote and still wild, with woods and gorges. At first time we thought to create for these photos something as an old ethnographical book: so I reminded that a great little Italian novel wrote as an ethnographical research were perfect for this case. The novel from whence I took the texts is “Christ stopped at Eboli” by Carlo Levi. Because of his uncompromising opposition to Fascism, Carlo Levi was banished in 1935 to a small primitive village in Basilicata. Carlo Levi (painter, doctor and writer, came from Turin, a large and elegant city in north Italy) lived out a strong experience in this remote province: until that time no one had ever told with emotional transport and umanity about this region. In 1945 he will write this book on that experience in Basilicata, making an anthropological and universal portrait of a primitive culture, on that misery, courage and dignity. I have brought this story together with Atayal character. (The title “Christ stopped at Eboli” means that civilization as we know it stops before Basilicata begins.)” by Matilde V. Laricchia, the copywriter