California Italian Studies

Italo Calvino has a widely recognized and significant position in Italian literature and culture as one of the masters of twentieth-century Italian letters, recognized for his intensely visual imagination and geometric formalism. This position, however, might actually understate Calvino’s significance, because his influence has been at least as significant outside of Italy as inside, and larger outside of literature than inside (Invisible Cities, in particular, has had an enormous influence in art, architecture, urban planning, design, and even social services offered in urban spaces). A useful model for thinking about transcultural and transmedial influence might be the notion of resonance, in which a sound (Calvino’s writing in this case) reverberates in an increasingly large and complex cultural space — such a model might be particularly attractive when it comes to Calvino, since it has the potential to reframe the attention to the visual and the geometric. This article looks to one particular example of this cultural resonance: Lisa Mezzacappa’s 2020 jazz suite of Calvino’s Cosmicomics. Jazz might seem like an unusual way of conceptualizing Calvino, but in Un ottimista in America, Calvino himself suggested that jazz has a particular and positive capacity to think through cultural dilemmas without “crystallizing” into a static and unproductive image (a point he would also make in one of his cosmicomic stories, tellingly entitled “I cristalli”). Indeed, jazz allows us a different way to hear Calvino: playful, improvisational, and sensual. Looking primarily at one track from Mezzacappa’s suite, “The Form of Space,” I contend that her adaptation encourages us to hear Calvino story as a critique of the purely cerebral, visual and geometric; the music instead gestures toward a subject who is neurotic, perverse and unpredictable. The improvisational nature of jazz and the Lucretian geometry of spacetime both suggest that the supposedly rational and composed subject might swerve out of the predictable straight line into surprising new territory that is boisterous, risky and remarkably open.