“Il limone spremuto del vivere”: Montale in Calvino

Abstract

Italo Calvino first read Eugenio Montale's Ossi di seppia and Le occasioni during WWII, learning by heart many a poem from both. Later, he considered La bufera the best book inspired by that war. That said, Montale intertextualities in Calvino's works are not limited to spare words or images. Instead, they are deeply rooted in a common landscape, the two Ligurian Rivieras, and they involve the very structure of Calvino's stories, due to the disenchanted vision of life (civil life included) and of the universe that Calvino largely shared with Montale. The evolution of Montale's poetry as a model for Calvino's prose is charted here from the mid-Forties to the semi-autobiographical cycle Palomar from 1983.