Naturally, this deep depersonalisation, this abdication of one’s human condition, is reflected among the first things in the human being’s relationship with the environment that surrounds him and in which he lives. Marcovaldo, like all the proletarians of the post-war period, comes from the peasant world; he is an urbanised peasant. In the great industrial city of the north, therefore, his relationship with nature is almost overturned, or rather distorted. He looks for traces of his world of reference in the ‘scraps’ of nature that the city seems to offer him, but each time he is left disappointed and bewildered: and ultimately even more confused about his present identity, about what he has become (from what he was) in the name of progress, development and modernity.
In the industrial city, nature is present only in the form of residual, distorted elements: the ‘strip of sterile, encrusted earth that follows the line of trees along the avenue’; the street sweeper whose ‘glasses [...] scanned the asphalt of the road in search of every trace of the natural to be wiped out with sweeps of the broom’; ‘the green of a tree-lined square, a patch of public garden cut out between four streets’.
Thus Marcovaldo finds himself forced to chase the traces of nature even at the cinema on the coldest evenings – the height, therefore, of alienation: ‘Marcovaldo’s passion was colour films, on the big screen that allows one to embrace the vastest horizons: prairies, rocky mountains, equatorial forests, islands where people live crowned with flowers. [...] in his thoughts he went on living in those landscapes and breathing those colours’.
The environmental question (or rather the ecological one, to use a term more typical of the years in which Calvino was writing) is tackled explicitly in the story entitled Dove è più azzurro il fiume (‘Where the River Is Bluer’). The theme of the story is in fact the ‘global’ pollution of the urban environment, which envelops every material aspect of the citizens’ lives: starting with the food they eat.
At the centre of the description of an already badly degraded environment is the city river: an open-air dump that collects the drains and sewers of the whole urban fabric.
Faced with this disarming reality, Marcovaldo’s response, given his limited means of working out the contradictions even politically, can only be to counter it with a leap into fantasy: an imaginary watercourse, imagined in a pastoral idyll. Hence the sentence, among the happiest in the whole book and often quoted: ‘I must find a place,’ he told himself, ‘where water is truly water, and fish are truly fish. There I shall cast my line.’
When Marcovaldo seems to have finally found his longed-for place, the awakening to the bitter urban and industrial reality (which has by now spread its tentacles well beyond the city) will be cruel.
The blue water he thought he had found in fact owes its colour to nothing less than the paint discharged by the factory upstream.
Everything, then, is poisoned, everything is artificial and corrupt: in the environment surrounding Marcovaldo nothing seems to be spared, and a most dangerous dictatorship of appearances and illusions is even taking shape. A ‘fake’ nature, artfully recreated to give humans the impression of a postmodern Eden. Something not too far, ultimately (even if perhaps Calvino had not gone so far as to foresee as much. Or perhaps he had) from a dangerous, deceptive and global greenwashing: the invisible enemy that today, sixty years after Calvino’s book, we find ourselves fighting far too often.
