Italo Calvino e il piacere del metatesto
Italo Calvino and the Pleasure of Metatext

Summary/Abstract: Almost all Italo Calvino's works from Cosmicomics onward (and occasionally some of the previous ones) are highly metanarrative, and to that he adds a series of essays in order to familiarize the readers with his literary and cultural vision. The Italian writer’s concern is not necessarily to delight his readers, but rather to educate them, to develop their critical faculties, to prepare them for the new millennium literature and, generally, to help them cope with the complexity of existence by training them for life by means of his labyrinthine narrative. He wants to combat the outward catastrophic and illogical labyrinth through writings that attempt to organize complexity without destroying it. Thus, meta-texts are fundamental for Calvino ("[...] writing no longer consists in narrating but in saying that it is being told [...]" in “Cibernetica e fantasmi”, 1967: 202), because by exploring and understanding the complex mechanisms of writing, the writer himself in the first place will be able to decipher the meaning of existence and creation and he will further on share it with the reader, but not in a ready-made way, so as to challenge and develop the latter’s cognitive skills. Basically, writer and reader embark on the same knowledge adventure.

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