Italo Calvino, ipotenusa fra culture ortogonali

Bischi, Gian Italo

Matematica, cultura e società, Série 1, Tome 8 (2023) no. 2, pp. 123-139

Résumé

The Italian writer Italo Calvino (1923-1985), whose birth centenary is being celebrated this year, is perhaps the 20th-century author who most clearly and systematically managed to build a bridge between the "two cultures". He expressed the many relations between literature and science and implemented his thinking through a genuine agenda, made up of important and original narrative experiments. This paper tries to identify, through an informal analysis and using many extracts from Calvino's writings, some features of this agenda, as well as to identify the timing and motivations of a decisive turning point in his literary production, after which the contamination between storytelling, science and myth has become stronger, almost totalizing.