California Italian Studies

The writer Italo Calvino and the architect Aldo Rossi were among the most prominent intellectual stars to emerge from Italy onto the international scene in the post-1968 period. Although there is no concrete evidence that the two men knew each other's work, or that they thought of themselves as part of the 'postmodernist' movement of those years, their respective career trajectories seem to parallel one another in sometimes striking ways. More importantly, Calvino and Rossi were erudite and voracious readers who shared a very wide-ranging set of literary and cultural references, as becomes apparent when the dense textual network of the Lezioni americane is mapped onto that of Rossi's notebooks (now known as the Quaderni azzurri), in which the architect recorded many of his readings as well as his reflections on the latter. This essay focuses principally on texts left unpublished by Calvino and Rossi while alive (and still not translated into English today), namely the unfinished lecture "Cominciare e finire"—drafted as part of the Norton series but eventually put aside by the author—and the aforementioned Quaderni azzurri. What emerges from the juxtaposition of these works is the central importance of theatrical texts, spaces, performances, and ultimately the concept of theater itself, in Calvino's and Rossi's respective cultural projects. For the former, theaters are a concrete "image of the ideal space in which stories take shape" (L/A 744), and thus may serve  as a synecdoche for all literary story-telling. For the latter, who designed and built a number of theaters over the course of his career, architecture is at its best when it concerned not with function but with making itself available ("disponibile") to the telling of the human story. This is never more the case than in the built environment of the theater, which is the desideratum of architecture—to become the place where stories with transformative power may take place—pushed to the extreme degree of what Rossi calls "pure availability" ("la disponibilità pura"). Both writer and architect not only acknowledge the cultural prestige of the theater, even in the media-saturated and dispersive era of late capitalism, but envision it as a place of unique imaginative freedom within the system of representation at the end of the millennium.