The Making of Italo Calvino: Women and Men in the ‘Two Cultures’ Home Laboratory

In the making of some major, XX-century, internationally known Italian writers, science was a key issue. The origins of that interest is quite obvious in authors like Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973), a professional engineer, or Primo Levi (1919-1982), a professional chemist, but what about Italo Calvino (1923-1985)? Many have written on the subject, but mainly concentrating on the intellectual, theoretical, and political aspects of the relationships between Calvino and science. Yet, in many of Calvino’s writings science is culture in such a concrete way that it’s inevitable for the historian of science to ask to the concrete context in which had origin his interest for nature and technoscience. This is possible, as it happens, taking to the centre the role of three women who have been kept on the margins for decades, in this case botanist Eva Mameli Calvino, Italo’s mother, and her female friends, painter Beatrice Duval, and writer Olga Resnevic Signorelli.