L’etnografo e l’umanista. Calvino, Bassani e l’ambiente

This article examines Italo Calvino's collaboration with Botteghe Oscure , a literary journal edited by Giorgio Bassani. In particular, it focuses on the two pieces he published therein: The Argentine Ant (1952), and A Plunge into Real Estate (1957). The primary aim is to explore potential intersections between Calvino's ecological vision and the humanist environmentalism espoused by Princess Marguerite Caetani – founder of the journal and guardian of the Garden of Ninfa – and by Bassani himself, who in 1955 co-founded the association Italia Nostra, eventually becoming its President in 1965. However, the analysis of the fragmentary and often opaque editorial traces will lead to the delineation of two antithetical approaches to environmental concerns, reflecting the 20th-century debate over the “two cultures”. On one hand stands Calvino's anti-anthropocentric and transformative perspective, ethnographically attentive to the techniques through which humankind has inscribed itself upon the earth; on the other, a sensibility that perceives nature and culture as harmoniously intertwined within the beauty of the landscape – an outlook rooted in the memory of tradition and committed to the preservation of places and monuments (villas, gardens, historic cities).