Italo Calvino and Aldo Rossi in dialogue. Representations of the monument in the city

Abstract

This paper examines the relations between the fictitious world of Italo Calvino and the architectural projects of Aldo Rossi in the urban context of the Italian Retreat after the crisis of the Modern Movement. Like Rossi, Calvino wants to participate in the debates of his cultural and architectural environment, even if it is not a literary or philosophical debate; the Italian writer wants to reshape the urban structure as a key factor in the construction of societies and their dwellings in the cities, in the same way that Rossi was doing at that time. Criticizing the functional city, we consider that both the architect and the writer endow the concept of monumentality of great importance in their thoughts. Our main purpose is to examine how, from their concepts about the typology of the monument, it can be stablished an interartistic relation for the comprehension of their texts. At the same time, we analyse how the reading of Calvino’s texts allows us to interpret them through Rossi’s ideas and how the Italian writer represents these ideas on his novels, tales, and literary essays.