In 2023 it will be one hundred years since the birth of the great writer, who was born and raised in Sanremo and lived in Turin, Paris and Rome. Italo Calvino is certainly one of the best-known and best-loved Italian men of letters of the twentieth century throughout the world; a model of invention and style, for the clarity of his writing and his inexhaustible imagination.
And yet Calvino’s imagination is based on experience.
Before flying away, free and happy like Cosimo in his hot-air balloon, or freeing herself like Bradamante at the end of The Nonexistent Knight, Calvino’s imagination feeds on the living sense of being, as a man, a part of the cosmos. For him, words and thought are the consequence of seeing, listening to and feeling the living nature that surrounds him, and the infinite, multiform universe that contains him.
Invisible Cities is certainly the Calvino book that best represents the author’s sensitivity to environmental themes. Published in 1972, when environmentalism was in its infancy, it has kept all its evocative power intact over the decades.
The book is made up of nine chapters, each of which opens and closes with a dialogue between Marco Polo and the Tartar emperor Kublai Khan: the latter questions the explorer about the cities of his immense empire. Each chapter contains five descriptions of cities visited by Marco Polo, except the first and the last chapters, which contain ten. In all, fifty-five cities, each with a woman’s name, mysterious and highly significant.
The relationship between cities and the surrounding environment is certainly the theme, the common thread of the narrative, that is most striking for its contemporary relevance and its ability to anticipate the current debate.
Leonia, for example, is the metropolis that remakes itself every day:
The city of Leonia remakes itself every day: every morning the population wakes between fresh sheets, washes with just-unwrapped bars of soap, puts on brand-new dressing gowns, takes still-unopened tins from the most advanced refrigerator, listening to the latest jingles from the latest model of radio.
The consequence is obvious and inevitable:
On the pavements, wrapped in spotless plastic bags, the remains of yesterday’s Leonia await the dustman’s cart. Not only squeezed toothpaste tubes, burnt-out light bulbs, newspapers, containers and packaging, but also water heaters, encyclopaedias, pianos, porcelain dinner services: […] the opulence of Leonia is measured by the things that are thrown away every day to make room for new ones.
The theme is therefore that of continual waste, of unbridled consumerism.
And unthinking, since nobody seems to worry about the consequences of their own actions (‘where the dustmen take their load each day nobody asks’). The result is a world invaded by heaps of rubbish, which the city produces without pause.
Leonia, it has been said, is the metaphor of our ‘throwaway’ society. And of the powerlessness of that society itself, which generates that shapeless, ungovernable chaos, to solve the problem of matter consumed and accumulated in a vicious, unnatural process, in which the rule that ‘nothing is created and nothing is destroyed’ is broken. Too much is created; and of all this, too little is recycled, nor can it be destroyed.
The higher it grows, the greater the danger of landslides: all it takes is one tin, one old tyre, one wickerless flask rolling towards Leonia, and an avalanche of unmatched shoes, calendars of past years and dried flowers will submerge the city in its own past, which it vainly tried to push away, mixed with that of the neighbouring cities, at last clean: a cataclysm will flatten the sordid mountain range and wipe out every trace of the metropolis always dressed in new clothes. Already the neighbouring cities are ready with their steamrollers to level the ground, expand into the new territory, enlarge themselves and push back the new rubbish dumps.
1. - To be continued
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, Einaudi 1972.
