In the American Italian departments, the use of literature for the development of second culture competence in the language courses tend to be sporadic. In fact, the teaching of language, culture and literature is likely to take place separately. Often, the teaching of Italian literature in the target language is restricted to upper division courses, whereas the introduction of literature in the language courses is not expected at the upper division level. On the other hand, the development of second culture acquisition has a tendency to be restricted to specific cultural courses. Also, language classes may risk to neglect cultural topics since they mainly focus on functions and tasks to be performed in the target language. Therefore, L2 Italian students that only take language courses may lack a good deal of both culture and literature competence. In this paper, I employ a language pedagogical approach to show how relevant it is the use of literary content-based input for teaching and learning Italian culture. In fact, it helps build a high level of cultural proficiency as well as critical thought. By using Carlo Levi’s memoir, “Cristo si è fermato a Eboli”, I aim at demonstrating the advantage of such a text to meet cultural learning objectives, like the debate on Italian Fascist regime and the confinement of Anti-Fascist intellectuals. This will encourage students to make a connection between a literary work and history, showing how relevant Levi’s book is for the development of cultural proficiency in Italian as a foreign language.