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 Italo Calvino’s
Architecture of Lightness
Routledge Studies in
Twentieth-Century Literature

1. Testimony from the Nazi Camps 10. Before Auschwitz

French Women’s Voices Irène Némirovsky and the Cultural
Margaret-Anne Hutton Landscape of Inter-war France
Angela Kershaw
2. Modern Confessional Writing
New Critical Essays 11. Travel and Drugs in Twentieth-
Edited by Jo Gill Century Literature
Lindsey Michael Banco
3. Cold War Literature
Writing the Global Conflict 12. Diary Poetics
Andrew Hammond Form and Style in Writers’
Diaries, 1915–1962
4. Modernism and the Crisis of Anna Jackson
Sovereignty
Andrew John Miller 13. Gender, Ireland and
Cultural Change
5. Cartographic Strategies of Race, Sex and Nation
Postmodernity Gerardine Meaney
The Figure of the Map in
Contemporary Theory and Fiction 14. Jewishness and Masculinity
Peta Mitchell from the Modern to
the Postmodern
6. Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics Neil R. Davison
of Consumption
Eating the Avant-Garde 15. Travel and Modernist Literature
Michel Delville Sacred and Ethical Journeys
Alexandra Peat
7. Latin American Writers and the
Rise of Hollywood Cinema 16. Primo Levi’s Narratives
Jason Borge of Embodiment
Containing the Human
8. Gay Male Fiction Since Charlotte Ross
Stonewall
Ideology, Conflict, and Aesthetics 17. Italo Calvino’s Architecture
Les Brookes of Lightness
The Utopian Imagination in
9. Anglophone Jewish Literature an Age of Urban Crisis
Axel Stähler Letizia Modena
 Italo Calvino’s
Architecture of Lightness
The Utopian Imagination
in an Age of Urban Crisis

Letizia Modena

New York London

First published 2011
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Simultaneously published in the UK

by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011.

To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

© 2011 Taylor & Francis

The right of Letizia Modena to be identified as author of this work has been asserted
by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereaf-
ter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trade-

marks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record has been requested for this book.

ISBN 0-203-81764-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN13: 978-0-415-88038-1 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-203-81764-3 (ebk)
Ai miei genitori
Contents

List of Figures ix
Acknowledgements xiii

Introduction 1

1 The Inner City of the Imagination: Utopia and the Ethical

Charge of Fiction 17

2 Retroterra: Urban Planners, Architects, and the City in Crisis 57

3 Memos for the City of the Next Millennium: Invisible Cities as

Embodiment of Urban Renewal 91

4 Architectures of Lightness 131

Epilogue 185

Notes 191
Works Cited 217
Index 239
Figures

1.1 Guy Rottier, Rêver (Daydreaming). Courtesy of Guy

Rottier. 41

2.1 Otto Frei, Petite ville de l’avenir (Small City of the

Future), 1960. In Michel Ragon, Histoire mondiale de
l’architecture et de l’urbanisme modernes. Courtesy of
Éditeur Casterman. 58

2.2 Nicolas Schöffer, Centre de loisirs sexuels (Center for

Sexual Diversions). In Michel Ragon, La cité de l’an 2000.
Courtesy of Éditeur Casterman. 84

2.3 Fausto Melotti, Alfabeto (Alphabet), 1971. Courtesy of

Archivio Fausto Melotti. 89

3.1 Paul Maymont, Ville des sables (City in the Sands). In

Michel Ragon, Histoire mondiale de l’architecture et de
l’urbanisme modernes. Courtesy of Éditeur Casterman. 95

3.2 Paul Maymont, Megastructure lunaire (Lunar

Megastructure). In Michel Ragon, Histoire mondiale de
l’architecture e de l’urbanisme modernes. Courtesy of
Éditeur Casterman. 99

3.3 Fausto Melotti, Il sonno di Wotan (Wotan’s Sleep), 1958.

Courtesy of Archivio Fausto Melotti. 116

4.1 Fausto Melotti, Scultura n. 21 (Sculpture Num. 21),

1935–68. Courtesy of Archivio Fausto Melotti. 136

4.2 Nicolas Schöffer, Centre de recherches scientifi ques

(Center for Scientific Research). In Michel Ragon, La cité
de l’an 2000. Courtesy of Éditeur Casterman. 136
x Figures
4.3 Fausto Melotti, Gli effi meri (Ephemerals), 1978. Courtesy
of Archivio Fausto Melotti. 138

4.4 Fausto Melotti, detail of Gli effi meri (Ephemerals), 1978.

Courtesy of Archivio Fausto Melotti. 138

4.5 Paul Maymont, Villes Suspendues (Suspended Cities). In

Michel Ragon, La cité de l’an 2000. Courtesy of Éditeur
Casterman. 144

4.6 Fausto Melotti, Il circo (Circus), 1965. Courtesy of

Archivio Fausto Melotti. 146

4.7 Fausto Melotti. Gli dei (case, alberi, nuvole) (Gods

[Houses, Trees, Clouds]), 1968. Courtesy of Archivio
Fausto Melotti. 148

4.8 Fausto Melotti, Da Shakespeare (After Shakespeare), 1977.

Courtesy of Archivio Fausto Melotti. 149

4.9 Fausto Melotti, Città (City), 1963. Courtesy of Archivio

Fausto Melotti. 151

4.10 Guy Rottier, Cité de vacances sur fil (Resort Town on

Cables), 1964–65. Courtesy of Guy Rottier. 152

4.11 Guy Rottier, Village Suspendu (Suspended Village),

1964–5. Courtesy of Guy Rottier. 153

4.12 Fausto Melotti, Il sacco (Sack), 1969. Courtesy of Archivio

Fausto Melotti. 154

4.13 Fausto Melotti, detail of Il sacco (Sack), 1969. Courtesy of

Archivio Fausto Melotti. 155

4.14 Biro and Fernier, Ville-en-X (1) (X City [1]). In Michel

Ragon, Histoire mondiale de l’architecture et de
l’urbanisme modernes. Courtesy of Éditeur Casterman. 158

4.15 Biro and Fernier, Ville-en-X (2) (X City [2]). In Michel

Ragon, Histoire mondiale de l’architecture et de
l’urbanisme modernes. Courtesy of Éditeur Casterman. 159

4.16 Fausto Melotti, Canal Grande (Grand Canal), 1963.

Courtesy of Archivio Fausto Melotti. 161

4.17 Michel Ragon, Les villes taupes (Mole Cities). In Michel

Ragon, La cité de l’an 2000. Courtesy of Éditeur Casterman. 163
 Figures xi
4.18 Guy Rottier, Maison enterrée ou maison échec (1) (Buried
House or Chessboard House I), 1965–78. Courtesy of Guy
Rottier. 164

4.19 Guy Rottier, Maison enterrée (2) (Buried House II), 1965.
Courtesy of Guy Rottier. 165

4.20 Guy Rottier, Maison enterrée (3) (Buried House III),

1965. Courtesy of Guy Rottier. 166

4.21 Guy Rottier, Maison pour Arman a Vence (House

for Arman in Vence), 1968. Histoire mondiale de
l’architecture et de l’urbanisme modernes. Courtesy of
Éditeur Casterman. 168

4.22 Yona Friedman, Structure spatiale au-dessus du vieux

Paris (A Spatial Structure on Top of Paris). In Michel
Ragon, Histoire mondiale de l’architecture et de
l’urbanisme modernes. Courtesy of Casterman Éditeur. 172

4.23 Moshe Safdie, Habitat 67 (Habitat ‘67), 1967. In Michel

Ragon, La cité de l’an 2000. Courtesy of Éditeur Casterman. 174

4.24 Paul Maymont. Cellules juxtaposables et superposables

(Juxtaposable and Stackable Cells). In Michel Ragon, La
cité de l’an 2000. Courtesy of Éditeur Casterman. 175

4.25 Fausto Melotti, Canone variato I (Varied Canon I), 1967.

Courtesy of Archivio Fausto Melotti. 177

4.26 Fausto Melotti, Tema e variazioni (Theme and Variations),

1968. Courtesy of Archivio Fausto Melotti. 179

4.27 Fausto Melotti, Tema e variazioni II (Theme and

Variations II), 1969. Courtesy of Archivio Fausto Melotti. 180

4.28 Walter Jonas, Intrapolis, 1970. Courtesy of Walter and

R. M. Jonas Foundation. 181

4.29 Walter Jonas, Intrapolis, 1966. Courtesy of Walter and

R. M. Jonas Foundation. 182

5.1 Guy Rottier, Hôtel (Hotel), 2009. Courtesy of Guy

Rottier. 188
Acknowledgements

A study such as this one cannot be mapped out, much less executed, with-
out the sacrifice and generosity of numerous individuals, groups, and insti-
tutions. I regret only that I cannot name them all or express adequately
my debts to them. As a matter of course, books only get published if edi-
tors and reviewers believe in them. I must thank Routledge editors Erica
Wetter and Elizabet Levine, my production editor and her staff, as well as
the anonymous reviewers of my book manuscript whose probing questions
and imaginative suggestions were extremely helpful. My thanks to Michael
Watters at Integrated Book Technology, Inc., for his attention to detail and
patience throughout the proofi ng process. Needless to say, any errors of
fact or interpretation are my own.
This book literally began as a footnote to my doctoral dissertation at Johns
Hopkins University. Accordingly, I wish to thank Professors Pier Massimo
Forni and Walter Stephens, Meme Amosso Irwin, and the dearly-departed
Salvatore Camporeale, from whom I learned the generative power of inter-
disciplinary and humanistic dialogue as well as scholarly rigor and ethics.
In the wake of my postdoctoral studies, several architects and architectural
historians warmly welcomed this visitor to their fields, encouraging and
aiding me in my research. I am profoundly grateful to Guy Rottier and Pro-
fessor Ricardo Castro. Andrea Ponsi in Florence shared with me his work,
writing, and thoughts on architecture in the ’60s and ’70s one afternoon
at his workshop. My gratitude also goes to Boyd Zenner, architecture and
environmental editor at the University of Virginia Press, whose enthusiasm
greatly advanced this project.
Since 2005, Villanova University has been my professional home and
a fount of collegial and material support. This book could not have been
written without the sabbatical semester I was granted by dint of Villanova’s
renewed commitment to research. Moreover, my colleagues at Villanova
have been stellar and stalwart. The chair of my department, Professor.
Mercedes Juliá, offered me encouragement and mentoring. My colleague
in Italian, Professor Gaetano Pastore, was always accommodating with my
schedule and assignments, and Professor Jan Rigaud always made himself
available when I needed a dose of wit. I benefited greatly from Professor
xiv Acknowledgements
Seth Whidden’s experience, mentoring and friendship. Professor Gary
Meltzer’s kindness, intellectual breadth, and visionary scope have been
priceless: our conversations about Lucretius and other ancient philosophers
helped me in ways that he cannot possibly know. Most of all, I would not
have completed my research and writing without the humor, humanity, and
intellectual stimulation of my dear friend, Professor José Luis Gastañaga.
A special salute is due to Joanne Quinn, Susan Ottignon, Phylis Wright,
and Barbara Quintiliano at Villanova’s Falvey Memorial Library for their
unfaltering and cordial assistance: the Interlibrary Loan personnel pro-
vided me with access to rare and unusual materials from the ’60s and ’70s,
unstintingly satisfying each and every one of my countless requests. Simi-
larly, the individuals and institutions who allowed me to reproduce illus-
trations for this study have been generous and efficient beyond belief. My
heartfelt thanks to Marta Melotti from the Archivio Fausto Melotti; Guy
Rottier; Éditeur Casterman; and Roy Oppenheim from the Walter and R.
M. Jonas Foundation.
My family has shown to me in a thousand ways how love transcends
geographical distance and the vicissitudes of life. My gratitude to them is
infi nite. I want to thank my parents Toni and Bity for all their years of sup-
port and encouragement: their inspiration of strength and joy accompany
me every day. I hope they know how much I respect and admire their tena-
cious engagement for a better world: I could not be prouder, and I could
not believe in it and look for a trace of idealism in every book I read with-
out their vision. My brother Marco has encouraged me throughout in that
silent but present way of his: to him, I want to say thank you for who you
are, and I wish I could spend more time with you. I want to express my love
and gratitude to Diletta, Francesco, Chiara, Emiliana, and Rosangela: your
thoughts and inquisitiveness radiate within me, and your affection lightly
flies over to my side of the ocean.
To my friends in Italy—Monica Pavani, Morgana Zuffi, Elena Buccoli-
ero, Giorgia Beccati, Ornella De Curtis, Giancarlo Berganti, Elisa Ruffo,
Tim Bloom, Elisa Penazzi, Nicola Spanò, Francesca Trevisani, and Michela
Turno—I owe a heartfelt thank you for all their warmth and closeness, for
believing in this project when I did not, and for being incomparable utopi-
ans. I am truly grateful to Cristina and Federico Bonatti and their family
for their friendship (and their amazing recipes), and to Nino and Anna Bor-
din for their kindness. I also must recognize two people who have been my
fi rst teachers and unique educators of the imagination: Paola Marangoni
and Anna Benazzi.
I am deeply indebted to my friends in the United States: Cristina Della
Coletta (for her warmth, humor, encouragement, and modeling of meth-
odological rigor since 1995), Karen Stolley, Anna Brickhouse and Bruce
Holsinger (for the dinners and for working their English magic), Regina
Rush, Adina Galan, Elizabeth Giraldez, Curtis Gilmore, Mrs. Anne Hop-
kins, Francesco Ciabattoni, Caterina Fava, Susanna Barsella, Eva Struhal,
 Acknowledgements xv
Francesco Fiumara, Valerie Mirshak, Gael Montgomery, Simona Ceci, Ste-
fano Giannini, Fulvio Orsitto, Clarissa Clò, Teresa Fiore, Laura Schulz,
Jessi Pakiela, Giuliana Chapman, Simone Dubrovic, Enrico Cesaretti,
Phyllis Fleischman, Daniela de Pau, Roberta Ricci, Margie Behr, Ruth M.
Hill, and Jennifer Hill. I have greatly benefited from the conversations with
Tomasina and Walter Fontanella, who have made it delightfully hard for
Ruth and me to choose between their wit and their wisdom, their paint-
ings and their music, as well as their risotto and their Philly cheesesteak.
Valentina Rutolo and Cristian and Irusckha DeRitis have provided food,
laughter, and relaxation when I most needed them. Imke Meyer and Heidi
Schlipphacke’s fondness and intelligence have infused me with motivation.
National Public Radio has been a constant friend throughout my residence
in the States, especially Ira Glass’s This American Life. I thank my stu-
dents at Villanova University for the optimism and enthusiasm with which
they greet my reading suggestions, and the education of vision that their
estranged eyes have given me.
Most of all I wish to thank Ruth Hill, whose patient acumen nudged
(pushed) my writing towards greater clarity and precision when I was ada-
mant that it could not possibly be more transparent, though it was not so. I
am forever grateful for her unflagging interest in this book, her opinions, and
her editing. Above all, I am grateful to life for bringing her imagination into
my city many years ago, and for convincing her to stay against all odds.
Introduction

This book recovers a lost history of interdisciplinary thought, politics,

and literary philosophy in the 1960s devoted to the possibilities of urban
reform. Drawing on Italo Calvino’s letters, essays, book reviews, and fic-
tion, as well as a wide range of works—primarily architectural and urban
planning and design theory—circulating among his primary interlocutors,
this study uses Calvino’s dialogue with architectural theorists and urban-
ists as a case study that has much to teach us today about the possibilities
for both urban life and exchanges across the arts and sciences in an increas-
ingly globalized (and, some would say, homogenized) world.
My central argument has emerged from original research on sources
that document Calvino’s extended forays into public and academic discus-
sions around the city and civic life during a period of urban crisis. His
relation to architecture and urban planning, to design and spatial theory,
has previously been understood as unidirectional. We know that architects
and designers read, teach, and draw theoretical sustenance from Calvino’s
work, and his writings appear regularly on syllabi at architecture schools.
We have yet to understand, however, the extent to which Calvino drew
explicitly and with deep urgency upon the work of those fields he now influ-
ences. Integrating a wealth of materials available only in Italian or French,
I show that Le città invisibili (1972; English trans., Invisible Cities [1974]),
as well as other works of fiction and his less well-known essays and critical
reviews, engage directly and deliberately with the theories, design projects,
exhibitions, and critical histories devoted to revitalizing urbanism in an era
renowned for its singular mixture of upheaval and optimism.
Calvino’s became convinced that urban and social renewal was urgently
needed and that a prerequisite for the same was a humanistic inquiry into the
nature of the city itself. Hence, the birth of his most acclaimed and best-sell-
ing work of fiction, Invisible Cities, deliberately reminiscent of a thirteenth-
century travelogue that Calvino greatly admired for its visionary charge,
Il Milione, or Le devisement du monde (The Travels of Marco Polo).1 In
Calvino’s late twentieth-century version, Marco Polo entertains an aging and
melancholy Mongol emperor with tales about cities in his dominions that he
has never seen. Immersed in a joyless existence, and overcome by the scale
2 Italo Calvino’s Architecture of Lightness
of his empire’s decline, Kublai Khan had long ago renounced hope of visiting
the cities personally and charged Polo with the duty of illustrating the status
of his territories. Described as a “visionary traveler,” the young explorer and
ambassador Polo does not report on cities that he has actually visited but
instead on invisible cities, or urban images seen in what Calvino called the
“inner city”—that is, on the screen of his imagination. Polo is effectively an
architect of invisible cities, and he models for Khan and the work’s readers
how to become architects of their own invisible cities.
Calvino’s fiction is organized around the often cantankerous, always
inquisitive conversations between the storyteller from the Venetian Republic
and the emperor. Within this frame, Polo describes the cities of the empire
in fi fty-five brief, fanciful accounts, compelling the Khan to visualize and
interpret his words. Admittedly, communication between the two is often
hampered by their personal and linguistic differences, and by the limits at
once to representation and to human knowledge of the world. Nonetheless,
their conversations convey, under eleven distinct rubrics, the realities and
the potentialities of the city as the maximum expression of human civiliza-
tion: “Cities and memory,” “Cities and desire,” “Cities and signs,” “Thin
cities,” “Trading cities,” “Cities and eyes,” “Cities and names,” “Cities and
the dead,” “Cities and the sky,” “Continuous cities,” and “Hidden cities.”
A “book of fables” (Ravazzoli, “Le città invisibili di Calvino” 224),
or perhaps an “encyclopedia of the Calvinian imaginary” (Barenghi, “La
forma” 30), Calvino’s 1972 fiction has been categorized and recategorized
repeatedly. The earliest critical readings classified the work as a perfect
example of intellectual detachment, that is, of a chasm that Calvino had
dug between literature and ethical and social commitment (Mengaldo).
That critical posture was reinforced by the novel’s semiotic fortuna in the
’70s, 2 and by subsequent critical analyses conducted through the various
lenses of contemporary philosophy. 3 In addition, scholars in the burgeon-
ing subfield of word and image studies have dedicated great attention to the
novel’s visuality. They alternate between explorations of the mental image
and speculations about the urban icons in the novel and their possible der-
ivations from Calvino’s visual and intellectual patrimony,4 including his
proclivity for ekphrasis and the visual and plastic arts.5
As a travel book, Invisible Cities has generated various ideological
analyses of its utopian undercurrents. Several critical studies have analyzed
the relationship between Calvino’s novel and Thomas More’s Utopia, or
other exemplars of traditional utopian discourse.6 Other critics identify the
dustlike, or infi nitesimal, and noncanonical character of Calvino’s utopia,7
acknowledging his conscious efforts to abandon the traditional, rationalist
conceptualization of utopia in favor of a modern, subjective utopia rooted
in the aesthetic and perceptual capabilities of the individual.8 Still other
scholars single out Calvino’s attempt to propose “new signs” (Bernardini
Napoletano), a tenacious quest involving reason and the imagination, albeit
skeptical about the prospect of a global utopian project.9
 Introduction 3
As a conscious parody of traditional utopia, Invisible Cities has gen-
erated a number of studies on the allegedly postmodern features of the
book. It is a work that demonstrates “the distinct game-playing or ludic
quality of the postmodern moment, with its pure, combinatorial play of
language, surface and form” (Gordon 180), or even a world “designed
. . . for the purpose of exploring ontological propositions” (43), as Brian
MacHale defi ned them in Postmodernist Fiction.10 Indeed, the 1972
work has at times played the role of expert witness in the literary trials of
modernism and postmodernism. This role was carved out for it by John
Barth’s seminal essay, “The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodern-
ist Fiction,” which sparked debate about whether Calvino’s 1972 novel
was modern, as Barth argued, or postmodern. Such critical studies were
uninterested in the urban realities of the ’60s and ’70s, and in Calvino’s
thought and works prior to the ’60s that are the subject of Lucia Re’s
remarkable Calvino and the Age of Neorealism.
A minority of scholars have hinted at a purpose that transcends the
ludic imaginary of postmodernism in the novel. Jeannet, for example, has
recognized that Calvino’s urban icons “are not empty labyrinths” (“Italo
Calvino’s Invisible City” 31), whereas Chessa Wright has clearly identi-
fied an edifying function in Calvino’s imagination. Barenghi has pulled
out a skein of realism in the novel to suggest that Calvino’s exploration of
the city shifts between a subjective approach (memories, feelings, hopes,
dreams) and objective references to living in the modern metropolis (“Gli
abbozzi” 76). Milanini too has called attention to “what is going on both
within and outside the individual subject” in the work (qtd. in McLaugh-
lin, Italo Calvino 109). Scattered allusions to architecture and urban plan-
ning in Invisible Cities, itself a “Borgesian manual of fantastic urbanism”
(Donnarumma 48), may be found in essays by Re, Michael Palmore, and
Luca Pocci, but the centrality of both fields to the novel has not been criti-
cally entertained, much less explained.11 Martin McLaughlin affi rms that
Invisible Cities is “introverted” (283) because “concern for contemporary
problems is typical of Calvino in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in the last
phase of his realistic period, but is absent from his later writings until Palo-
mar (1983)” (“Calvino’s Library: Labyrinth or Laboratory?” 277). Else-
where, the same renowned specialist fully senses that “Invisible Cities . . .
is not just a postmodern game, but a serious, and beautiful, prose-poem
about real problems in urban existence” (McLaughlin, Italo Calvino 108).
His comments are revealing of the multifaceted, ambivalent nature of the
work itself.
Calvino’s understanding of fiction as a medium for cognitive, rational,
and ethical searching has been generally acknowledged.12 Yet, we still do
not know what he set off in search of by writing his 1972 fiction, or why and
how he chose the itinerary that we encounter in it. The present study offers
the fi rst sustained analysis of how the urban icons in Invisible Cities tackle
issues related to the crisis of the contemporary city, and to the complexity
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