Calvino and the Landscape of Childhood

University of Edinburgh) Claudia Nocentini (Lecturer in Italian, Claudia Nocentini (Lecturer in Italian, University of Edinburgh)

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781902653235
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351196857
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"Although never named as such, the landscape of Sanremo was a visual source for Calvino's fiction. This recurring theme provides both a link between some very different works and an insight into the autobiographical dimension of an author whose attitude to privacy is protective but detached. This work is an analysis of the criteria of representative (and of representational distortion) of a descriptive motif."

Chapter I
The Realist Landscape

The texts to be studied in this chapter have much in common. First, they were all written within a relatively short space of time, over a period of seven years, between 1946 and 1953. The first three were written in the immediate post-war period when, for the young Calvino, Sanremo was the dramatic setting both for recent events, and for all of his personal experience. In the last two, written after the 1948 political disillusionment of the Italian left, but before Calvino renounced the Communist party after the Soviet military intervention in Hungary, the return to the landscape of Sanremo is linked to the awakening of the author's historical awareness and hence also, in part, the origins of his political opinions.

But the stylistic links between these texts are more interesting than their temporal framework, and this is why they have been chosen. The representations of the Sanremo landscape brought together in this chapter have not moved very far from the conventions of nineteenth-century realism. In these texts as in realist fiction, the landscape has a well defined role and function as a field within which the action occurs, in a mimesis of the relation between subject and space in reality. It also serves roughly to characterize the socioeconomic background of the characters, in a deterministic relationship which echoes the presumed interaction between the individual understood as a historical subject, and his or her milieu. Lastly, if we regard reflection on the landscape by any one character (who clearly may also be the narrator) as a particular kind of activity which throws light on his or her state of mind, the external world is also an indicator of emotional concerns. In other words, if it cannot be said that Calvino was doing anything very original stylistically in these texts, they still add to our understanding of his way of proceeding. Moreover, during these years Calvino saw the Ligurian Riviera as a relatively unknown landscape in Italian literature ('un paesaggio che nessuno aveva mai descritto davvero', Prefazione 1964, in Romanzi e racconti II, 1188), and the very fact of representing it was already proof of originality:

Sono d'una terra, la Liguria, che d'una tradizione letteraria ha solo frammenti o accenni, cosicché ognuno può — gran fortuna! — scoprirsi o inventarsi una tradizione per suo conto

('Forestiero a Torino', 1953, in Saggi II, 2705)

This is a somewhat surprising statement if we consider Montale's contribution (though he had described the other Riviera, as Calvino specifies in the Prefazione 1964), but understandable if seen in relation to the public whom Calvino was addressing, an occasional public such as that of the readers of L'Unità, broader and presumably far less specialized than the readers of Ossi di seppia.

Here it may be helpful to refer briefly to Calvino's articles on Sanremo and Liguria, published in Il Politecnico during this same period — 'Liguria magra e ossuta' (1945), 'Riviera di Ponente' and 'Sanremo città dell'oro' (1946) — as proof of the need to give prominence to a world he considered to be often ignored in the broader national context. The first article analyses the natural and historical causes of the poverty of the local agriculture. The second, 'Riviera di Ponente', provides a brief description of the interconnected course taken by two kinds of local history:

la storia della Riviera di Ponente si può raccontare in due maniere; una che tratta della storia degli uomini tra loro, del popolo e della piccola borghesia prima contro i saraceni poi contro i nobili, poi contro i vescovi, poi contro i genovesi, poi contro i Savoia, poi contro i fascisti. L'altra che racconta la lotta degli uomini con la terra di come i terreni coltivati a segale o a fave tornarono incolti, di come agli agrumeti succedettero le piantagioni di rose e di garofani, di come gli uliveti deperirono e furono abbandonati e distrutti.¹

The third one, 'Sanremo città dell'oro', traces the history of the old and poor city of Sanremo, known as la Pigna, and of its mirror image, Sanremo the affluent tourist trap.

The ideological slant of Calvino's vision leaves no room for doubt, but if there was an initial propensity to portray Sanremo as a predominantly peasant backdrop, at once picturesque and unassuming, it was short-lived, particularly since what mattered to Calvino in those years was indeed a vision of involvement in history rather than an interest in rural idylls.

Proof of this tendency remains, above all in works which were later abandoned, such as 'Alba sui rami nudi' and 'Di padre in figlio', where the Ligurian landscape — but only the hill-country, and therefore outside the scope of this study — is purely rural, cocooned in its own time-space system and isolated from the rest of the world as much as, maybe even more than, Aci Trezza in I Malavoglia. But these are rarities, excluded from later collections precisely because of their anachronism of style. Overall, Calvino's attitude seems directed towards representing local colour as a starting point for a wider exploration of the world, and more rarely as an isolated rejection of history, part of a self-destructive and asocial attitude which reflects the bizarre exception and not the rule.

The texts studied in this chapter are those in which the landscape appears in its entirety, or rather, as made up of sea-city-hills, and hence only a small part of those which the landscape of Sanremo appears, also in a realist manner but only in part (Ί figli poltroni', Ί fratelli Bagnasco', 'Paura sul sentiero' etc.). This limitation also brings with it consequences concerning content, because the greater importance given to the external worlds tends to shed light on the emotional state of the characters who people and contemplate the landscape, restricting their other activities, so that these are among the most meditative and peaceful of the first writings in which the Sanremo landscape appears.

These works also include a representational constant of considerable interest, namely the description of the landscape caught at the moment in which it is touched by light. This concern with the particular instant of perception is undoubtedly one of those stylistic peculiarities of Calvino's prose which have earned him a reputation as a scientific writer, not in the literal sense, but, once again, in the nineteenth-century understanding of the term, i.e. as a writer capable of capturing and expressing the specificity of a range of natural phenomena concisely and perceptively.

'Uomo nei gerbidi'

The first appearance of the landscape of Sanremo dates from a story of 1946 entitled 'Uomo nei gerbidi'. It is an account of a hare-hunting expedition with the narrator's father, of the route taken to reach the ideal location and of talk with a local peasant and his daughter while his father has gone off to drive the game out of the wood. The hare manages to escape unhurt and the hunt is abandoned. But hunting is merely an excuse for the narrator to reach the preferred position from which to contemplate his panorama. The narrative first person is clearly autobiographical,² and one can even recognize a brief portrait of Calvino in the following:

camminavo a passi lunghi come mio padre ma con le mani seppellite nelle tasche e il lungo collo appollaiato tra le spalle

(Romanzi e racconti I, 186)

Equally biographical, from a psychological point of view, is the narrator's singular proneness to imaginative speculation which immediately reveals him as differing from his original milieu:

Al mattino presto si vede la Corsica: sembra una nave carica di montagne sospesa laggiù sull'orizzonte. Se si fosse in un altro paese ne sarebbero nate delle leggende; da noi no: la Corsica è un paese povero, più povero del nostro, nessuno ci è mai andato e nessuno ci ha mai pensato.

(Romanzi e racconti I, 186)³

Yet this tendency towards contemplation and day-dreaming has youthful aspects, since it is not without reserve and a certain sense of alarm:

La Corsica sparì bevuta dalla luce, ma tra mare e cielo il confine non si quagliò: rimase quella zona ambigua e smarrita che fa male guardare perché non esiste.

(Romanzi e racconti 1,186)

The description of the landscape dwells mainly upon the moment of perception, as we see right from the first phrase: 'Al mattino presto si vede la Corsica' (Romanzi e racconti I, 186) and despite the colloquial register it is predominantly an objective and scientific analysis of the phenomenon:

Quando di mattina si vede la Corsica è segno che l'aria è chiara e ferma e non accenna a piovere.

(Romanzi e racconti I, 186)

At all events, attention is focused on the phenomenon of dawn, the changing and brightening of the colours from that half-light where, although the field of vision was greater, the masses of colour were almost indistinguishable:

Le cose impigrivano nel grigio dell'alba come in un socchiudere di palpebre ancora assonnate. Al mare non si distinguevano confini, traversato fino in fondo da lame di foschia.

(Romanzi e racconti I, 187)

This change is produced by light:

L'alba andava scoprendo i colori, a uno a uno. Prima il rosso delle bacche [di gigaro], dei tagli zonati sugli alberi di pino. Poi il verde, i cento, i mille verdi dei prati, dei cespugli del bosco, poco prima tutti eguali: adesso invece ogni momento c'era un nuovo verde che nasceva e si distingueva dagli altri. Poi l'azzurro: quello urlante del mare che assordò tutto e fece restare pallido e timoroso il cielo.

(Romanzi e racconti I, 187)

The expedient of using an extraneous and incongruous point of reference to describe the dominance of one blue over another, the recourse to words taken from the semantic field of sound, emphasizes the quality of the perception and at the same time increases the magnetic power of the object observed, introducing the sense of dizziness which upsets the observer.

The light is reflected off the sea, it is dazzling. Its task of breaking up the solid, compact mass overlooking it is harder:

A un tratto case, tetti, vie nacquero a piè delle colline, in riva al mare. Ogni mattina la città nasceva così dal regno delle ombre, tutt'a un tratto, fulva di tegole, baluginante di vetri, calcinosa d'intonachi. La luce ogni mattino la descriveva nei particolari più minuti, raccontava ogni suo andito, enumerava tutte le case.

(Romanzi e racconti I, 187)

Illuminating the nearest objects first (the berries of the cuckoo-pint, in the 1958 edition), then the horizon, and after having lingered on the village below — with different speeds — the light now rises:

Poi veniva su per le colline scoprendo sempre nuovi dettagli: nuove fasce, nuove case. Arrivava in Colla Bella, gialla e gerbida e deserta, e scopriva una casa anche lassù, sperduta, la più alta casa prima del bosco, a un tiro di fucile dal mio fucile, la casa di Baccinin il Beato.

(Romanzi e racconti I, 187)

Throughout the description the subject of the action is thus not the observer's gaze, as it will be for example in Palomar, but the light. It is by following the light, too, that the narrative can produce the playful leap from the house to the gun and a vividly comic inversion which introduces the equally comic character of Baccinin Beato. The effect is one of alienation on the part of the narrator, whose exaggerated passivity is predominant in his relations with others and seems to be one of the main themes of the story, expressed partly through the illusion of objectivity, and the scientific observation of reality, and partly by following the light and reporting the grievances of the other characters.

The meeting between hunter and peasant is humorous: the low-mimetic key in which all the characters are treated sinks ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• CHAPTER I The Realist Landscape
• CHAPTER II The Landscape of the Fairy-Tale
• CHAPTER III Echo Effects
• CHAPTER IV The Inner Landscape
• Bibliography
• Index