From Boeri to Soldini, the many legacies of Italo Calvino

100 of these Calvin

Writer, first of all.

Intellectual, above all.

But Italo Calvino was also a screenwriter, a great lover of cinema, so much so that he ran away from home to run to the cinema, songwriter and, above all, an incredible source of inspiration.

is a special that ANSA dedicates to the great writer who would have turned 100 in October, choosing to tell him, on a monthly basis, from a different perspective than usual: that of someone who, through his vast and multifaceted works, has found the 'inspiration for projects, books, TV series, songs and even skyscrapers.

Because Calvino, through his novels, was certainly what Bobbio meant by intellectual: "The sower of doubts".

And he managed to do it in an absolutely transversal way, reaching his readers at different stages of their lives.

The child who leaves the table never to return and begins an incredible human and philosophical adventure in the treetops has left a seed in anyone who has read

.

Feeding the sense of rebellion as children, insinuating doubt about a life channeled into the wrong tracks as adults, to the point of reflecting on the very meaning of existence by discovering its philosophical plan at a more mature and aware age.

A seed that was able to germinate, transforming itself into the most revolutionary project of the architect

 the vertical forest, the marriage between nature and the city.

“

has been a sort of continuous inspiration for me ”, explains Boeri who smiles when he thinks of the novel.

Boeri: 'My Wood was born thanks to the rampant Baron'

“This idea of ​​the possibility of a past life standing on the branches of trees in a forest has been an enzyme that has worked for years in my way of thinking about architecture”.

An architecture that turns the point of view upside down.

“I believe that basically with great modesty and humility, an attempt to truly give substance to this apparently impossible idea, which Calvino presents to us as entirely plausible, of being able to descend from the branches of a forest to experience the city, to experience social relations and history, a bit with the vertical forest we tried to implement it”.

The passion for the protagonist of the novel led Boeri, during the pandemic, to dedicate a long video to the analysis of the book and to dedicate a section to it on his website, under inspirations

  “I owe my obsession with trees to

, the little Baron who one evening in 1767 in Ombrosa, a small town in western Liguria, decided, at the age of 12, to leave the ground and live in the trees for the rest of his life”, writes the great architect.

But it's not just the relationship with nature, albeit incredibly topical, that leaves its mark when reading

.

"It's a book about the freedom to be yourself," assures the writer

.

Which tells how Calvino was a source of inspiration for her through

.

Tamaro: 'My trip to Italy thanks to Italian fairy tales'

“I really loved the collection, which is a very important work in my opinion and being a lover of fairy tales and a children's writer I trained a lot on this work”.

But not only that, for the writer fairy tales also represented a sort of journey to discover Italy.

“With her book, Calvino introduced me to this Italian culture which, being from Trieste, I knew little about, he introduced me to my country”.

Calvino also joined

as boys and, once again, worked within them until he became a source of inspiration for 'Musica very light', the song that made them known at Sanremo 2021, complete with a press room award , inspired by the essay on levity in

.  

Colapesce and Dimartino: 'Calvino master of fantasy'

Colapesce, who Calvino discovered at school, then became passionate about it at university, so much so that he chose it for his degree thesis.

“The chapter on lightness in American Lessons is beautiful.

It's a book with Chinese boxes where he also recommends others and it helped me a lot to discover authors I didn't know, such as Brecht for example".

A guide in cultural formation, therefore.

But not only.

Calvino succeeded, in Dimartino's case, where all parents would like to arrive: saying the right sentence, in front of a teenager in the midst of the search for identity.

“There was this phrase that a professor said to me at school, attributing it to Calvino: 'Sometimes one feels incomplete but in reality one is only young'.

This sentence opened up a world for me,” he explains.

The great writer was also an inspiration for the sailor

, certainly the figure closest to a modern Marco Polo, the protagonist of the

called by the Grand Vizier to tell of his travels with all the cities he has seen "and perhaps also the ones he hasn't even seen”, jokes Soldini.

And it is no coincidence that the novel is always on board during its solo crossings.

Soldini: 'Here's what I would tell the Great Khan about invisible cities'

But what if he were the Marco Polo of the novel?

What would you tell the Great Khan?

“I would tell him about the Sea of ​​Cortez, in Baja California, a closed but also very, very lively sea – he explains – where you can really see nature coming out from all sides.

It is so alive that one is almost afraid to take a bath".

  What everyone has learned from the great writer Calvino is to fly with the imagination, to dare with the imagination.

The rules on how best to let the imagination run wild dictate the rest

Calvino himself

.

“A few years ago we said 'the imagination in power', it seemed like a very nice slogan, thinking back on it, the secret is that the imagination never takes power, it doesn't become a watchword, it doesn't become an obligatory programme.

Imagination, fantasy and creativity must oppose an element of routine, limitation and predictability which makes life livable.

Trouble if there is only the foreseeable, but if everything is fantasy nothing is achieved ”, he says.

And he concludes: “Probably if we have a scenario of gray parallelepipeds around us we can decorate it with flags and festoons, butterfly wings.

If we have around us a scenario of only butterfly wings, nothing comes out”.

Here, the parallelepiped is perhaps a skyscraper to be transformed into a forest, a blank sheet to be filled with a very light song,