Calvino Between Myth and Science. Cosmological Reflections Mediated by the Latin Classics

Italo Calvino describes cosmological issues both through narrative reworkings, as in the case of many stories, and with essay reflections. He divulges the most recent scientific discoveries and hypotheses relating to the world’s birth and development through myth, following the model of some Latin authors such as Lucretius, Ovid and Pliny the Elder. The methodology of this study aims to compare the Calvinian critical readings of the three authors, highlighting the affinities, in order to understand the role they play in his reworkings. After having identified some thematic and stylistic constants, the emphasis is placed on the differences between the three authors and on the three level of analysis of their “cosmicity” in a cosmological, cosmogonic and cosmographic point of view. The cosmicomic story La forma dello spazio is a specific example of how Calvino analyzes and re-elaborates cosmological elements of Latinity with the aim of finding an expedient to address scientific topics through the literary medium. The purpose of this analysis is to identify the influences of these authors in Calvino’s essay production in the 1970s and 1980s and to examine the rewriting of some Latin elements in his cosmicomic stories and in Palomar. In the perspective of understanding how the analysis of Latin classics’s reception allows the ancient to relive in the contemporary, the research question is if Calvino’s proposal takes on a new light, certainly free from the postmodern canon, in the panorama of literature of the second half of the twentieth century. Calvin himself, in the footsteps of the Latin authors, would become a classic among the classics.