Moral Fable and Narrative Invention in the works of Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino (1923-1985) is definitely one of the authors who has best experienced the essential events of post-war intellectual history, following the transformations of Italian and international culture in the course of forty years. Furthermore, he had the great merit of contributing to the birth of "experimentalism" and to that of the era of new linguistic and thematic horizons alien to neorealisnn. What stands out in this phase of Italo Calvino's production is an underlying tendency to succumb to the fabulous, which had already characterized some of his juvenile works of fiction - such as Il visconte dimezzato (1952). This novel and two others, namely Il barone rampante (1957) and Il Cavaliere inesistente (1959), collected in the 1960 volume I nostri antenati (a title which emphasizes the connection with the present of the events experienced by the three protagonists "nobles of fable", so to speak, due to their unusual relationships with one another and with reality), enable one to refer to him as a gifted writer of absolutely unique and distinctive talent. In fact, Italo Calvino demonstrates in these three short novels how unfettered invention can be combined with a moral attitude and human reason without any dogmatic intention. These are, fundamentally, three works of fiction that can be read as true parables of reason; in other words, as an indissoluble union of fable, morality and narrative invention.