Abstract

Sixty years after his first review on "Mondo operaio", Alberto Asor Rosa deals with "Il barone rampante" again, focusing on the previously underlined penchant for duplicity of Italo Calvino. As reality always carries past features in its present advancing process, the characters that Calvino creates in his trilogy belong both to a past imagination and to a collective and individual present. Reading the novel as an autobiographical allegory proves key to the understanding of a possible synthesis of Calvino's antinomies, also considering the correspondence between narrative landscape and writing forms.