Home, Roots, Cosmos: A Path through Calvino’s Ecology

Authors

  • Serenella Iovino University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5282/rcc-springs-4966

Abstract

Strange animals, unsustainable cities, evolving beings, and nature-seeking proletarians populate Italo Calvino’s oozingly ecological narrative worlds. This essay examines one of Calvino’s most popular novels, The Baron in the Trees (1957), contextualizing it within the landscape it is set in and exploring the multifaceted strands of its environmental creativity. Under close inspection, unforeseen paths of political ecology, environmental history, and even biosemiotics and plant neurophysiology emerge, bringing the clairvoyance of his work vis-à-vis our current planetary crises to the fore. This piece is an invitation to read literary works not only alongside their landscapes but in their landscapes, and to consider the potential of stories in the shaping of our environmental imagination.

Author Biography

  • Serenella Iovino, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

    Serenella Iovino is a professor of Italian studies and environmental humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has authored and edited 12 books and more than 150 essays and articles. Among her most recent publications are Italo Calvino’s Animals: Anthropocene Stories (2021) and Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation (2016), winner of the MLA Prize and AAIS Book Prize. A philosopher by training and a public intellectual, she is a columnist for the Italian newspaper la Repubblica. Photograph by Dino Ignani.

     

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Published

31-10-2023

Issue

No. 4 (2023)

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2023 Serenella Iovino

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.