From city to city in the vegetation of phrases

Already from the title, Italo Calvino nelle città - in theatres from tomorrow to 30 October -, it is clear that the film-tribute to the Sanremo writer by Davide Ferrario and Marco Belpoliti is 'spatial', i.e. linked both to lived and tangible places, and to the 'otherworldly' dimensions practised by Calvino in his fantastic books. In fact, the film's authors are also two 'spatial' intellectuals, starting with the director, Ferrario, versatile between fiction and documentary, who set a successful film, After Midnight (2004), in the verticality of Turin's Mole Antonelliana and who succeeds in conveying Eco's thought (Umberto Eco - La biblioteca del mondo, 2023) through the tunnels and shelves filled with volumes of the semiological, lunatic, magical and pneumatic library. Marco Belpoliti - author of the script together with Ferrario - wrote his first essay on Calvino in 1990, Storie del visibile. Reading Italo Calvino (Luisè), followed by Italo (Sestante, 1995), L'occhio di Calvino (Einaudi, 1996). Observing the way the body occupies space, he has restored the personality of some politicians, including Berlusconi in Il corpo del capo (Guanda, 2009 and 2018).

The film alternates the "visible" cities, in which Calvino lived, with the "invisible" ones of the 1972 Einaudi novel of the same name, interpreted by the voice of Violante Placido. The actress is also "spatial", thanks to Giada Masi's costumes and the abstract scenarios chosen by Francesca Bocca: an abandoned factory, a dilapidated villa, a disused theatre. It starts in its native Sanremo, whose original nucleus has become invisible due to the Building Speculation (1963, Einaudi), denounced in a courageous tale. The film shows how Villa Meridiana, the name of the family home where Calvino grew up from the 1920s onwards, is now choked by concrete. When he was a child, the house marked the boundary of the settlement with pure nature. The son of the agronomist Mario, who had created a botanical station in the villa, and the botanist Eva Mameli, the young Italo, unlike his parents, lived the map of the planet from the villa downwards, that is to say in the man-made world, where he could find the shops, the people and above all the cinema he frequented every afternoon. Here he unleashed his imagination through American films, musical comedies and detective stories, resting mainly on the unparalleled actor's faces, clearly prevailing over the plot. From the variety of species in the home botanical station, Calvino borrowed the sense of a vegetationof phrases, i.e. literary, linguistic and scriptural varieties, the antechamber to the literary games of OuLiPo and books such as Il castello dei destini incrociati (Einaudi, 1969).

Filippo Scotti interprets the writer's youthful phase through his texts - including, Eremita a Parigi, edizioni Pantarei, 1974, then Mondadori, 1994; Sono nato in America, Mondadori 2012, 2022;Palomar, Einaudi, 1983-, mixed with archive material, original and non-original interviews, found footage, photographs and music, of which Calvino was a skilful lyricist ('Il cappotto umido di nebbia' from the Cantacronache is sublime). His experience as a partisan in the Maritime Alps is entrusted to the words of Remembrance of a Battle, The Pine Cone, The Spider's Nest Trail and a cautionary phrase about the 'fragile fortune', always in danger, of living in peace and freedom. Then Calvino takes on the face of Alessio Vassallo in Turin, the city of his studies and his enthusiastic participation in the publishing life of Einaudi, born of the passion for the practical 'operating' of their 'beautiful' generation. 'The most time I have ever spent on other people's books,' he explains with a hilarious look.

The Turin period, until 1970, is interrupted by a scholarship in America - from 1959 to 1960 -, where he falls in love with the Big Apple: 'My city is New York, a city without roots, where I can pretend I have them. It is a prototype of a city that I can delude myself that I can master with my mind'. In Rome, where he initially rented a small flat in 1962, is Valerio Mastandrea. Here he lives with his wife, the Argentinian translator Esther, Chichita, Singer, whom he met in Paris, and here in 1965 his daughter Giovanna is born. Paris is in his heart, 'the ideal place where I live as a foreigner', which he consults like an encyclopaedia in continuity between the Louvre and the cheese shops. Starting with the etymology of poubelle, rubbish, he prophetically anticipates that cities will burst with waste with 'an uninterrupted eruption'. Paris is also the conjunction with the invisible cities, born from the exploration of the 18th century, the age in which, resting on the Enlightenment, fantastic literature was born. The list of the archives consulted is very long and hides a hard work of study and editing (by Cristina Sardo) in the sign of the best Calvinian literary fiction, perhaps the most beloved of the American Lessons (Garzanti, 1988).