TRAVELING WRITINGS: FROM AMERICAN DIARY TO FILM REPORTAGE BY ITALO CALVINO

Abstract

Starting in 1959, Italo Calvino’s relationship with the United States is enhanced with implications: his intense youthful passion for Hollywood movies, his interest in American writers, and his scrutiny of American politics merged with an “immediate emotional reaction” to American society and its big cities. Many texts emerged from his engagement with “the God’s Country”: in addition to the well-known American lectures and a few unsystematic writings, Calvino wrote some American diaries, a variety of hybrid texts that would be included in the memoir-reportage withdrawn at the draft stage (Un ottimista in America). This paper traces the first dialogues with America and aims to shed light on a lesser-known episode in Calvino’s bibliography: his commentary for Luigi Vanzi’s documentary America (1966), a script that draws on the work “disvoluted” and presents itself as a description of pictures for “the other world that was the world”.