Italo Calvino e le città della “contiguità universale”

In Invisible Cities Calvino abandons a fixed and progressive narrative unfolding, affirming the practice of storytelling as an ordered but potentially inexhaustible co-presence of fragments of discourse. But the work that most expresses a discontinuous cognitive and representational approach is also one in which the author cultivates an ideal of “universal contiguity” (an expression that many years later will be associated with Ovid’s Metamorphoses). The sense of continuity and transformation pervades Invisible Cities, helping to define its linguistic consistency and clarifying the moral challenge of a literary quest that, in its geometric precision, resists any deterministic fixity.