La carta del Mondo. Italo Calvino nel "Castello dei destini incrociati"

This book suggests new reading strategies for a novel that represents a singular event, not only in Italo Calvino’s narrative production, but also in the history of Nineteenth-Century literature. "The Castle of Crossed Destinies" (1973) is approached in a cartographical way, as an attempt to give the map of a labyrinthine world, complicated by inexhaustible meanings and, in any case, destined to be swallowed by Modernity’s wheel. Though conserving the features of the encyclopaedic novel, the "Castle" is shown as a book that tries to dodge the desire to represent the world as a whole, as a totality: on the contrary, it chooses to go through the paths of potentiality and metamorphosis, seeking the prime factors of every possible story. The "Castle" is a sort of Tower of Babel, an Ark of the Covenant: Savio’s monography underlines that this novel grows out of the need to check the reasons of literature and to rethink the role of intellectuals: in the end of the Sixties, allegorically and figurally, Calvino sets up an alarmed reflection about the coexistence of mankind, foretelling the apocalypse of a world that is called to rescue its old faith in planning and utopia.