Scales of Responsibility: The Dark Side of Italo Calvino

Presented by prof. Maria Anna Mariani

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Italo Calvino (1923-1985), the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago, in collaboration with the Department of Modern Languages, Italian Program, at DePaul University, presents “Italo Calvino’s Universe” a series of lectures on literature, ecology, arts and ethics, that will explore exemplary and less known themes, from the vast body of work of the italian author, between fantastic elements and historical issues.

This lecture offers a very different picture of Italo Calvino from the idea of fairy tales and lightness that has been etched into our collective imagination. For his entire career, Calvino has been preoccupied with the problem of atomic energy and nuclear weapons and has written extensively about it—and yet this subject matter, so intrinsic to his production, has been almost unanimously overlooked.

This lecture proposes a possible atomic genealogy for the “cosmic turning point” in Calvino’s work—a break in his intellectual trajectory that has been widely discussed and at times denigrated as an evasion from the human and a nihilistic dispersal into the animate and inanimate objects of the universe. Against this common interpretation, Maria Anna Mariani’s aim is to demonstrate that escapist intentions are the furthest thing from his words. On the contrary, what comes through is the urgency of a moral imperative to adapt human’s behavior to the most expanded scales of time and space. It is precisely in a cluster of writings on nuclear power that we first encounter this moral imperative. By analyzing these texts—on the goats sacrificed for the Crossroad tests in Bikini island, on the neutron bomb, and on the eternity of nuclear waste—we will appreciate how Calvino exhorts us to vastly expand our sphere of responsibility and to recognize the necessary interdependence between the human and the non-human.

The presentation will be moderated by Caterina Mongiat Farina, Associate Professor and Director of the Department of Modern Languages, Italian Program, at DePaul University. 

Free and open to the public. Registration is not required. Doors open at 4:30pm CT and seats are assigned on a first-come-first-served basis, until capacity is reached.

This program is part of The Week of Italian Language in the World, a yearly worldwide celebration of the Italian language and creativity. This initiative was born in 2001 in cooperation with the Accademia della Crusca. It is organized during the third week of October by the Embassies, Consulates, and Italian Cultural Institutes, with the support of the Ministry of Culture (MiC), the Ministry of University and Research (MUR), the Government of Switzerland and all of the main partners for the promotion of the Italian language.