It Is Not True What Everyone Always Says
that the only way to see America is to go across it by car. Apart from the fact that it is impossible given its enormous size, it is also deadly boring. A few outings on the motorway are enough to give an idea of what small-town and even village America is like on average, with the endless suburbs along the highways, a sigh of desperate squalor, with all those low buildings, petrol stations or other shops which look like them, and the colours of the writing on the shops signs, and you realize that 95 per cent of America is a country of ugliness, oppressiveness and sameness, in short of relentless monotony. Then you go across even deserted areas for hours and hours, like those we crossed amid the forests and coasts of California, certainly among the most beautiful places in the world, but even there you feel a certain lack of interest, perhaps because of that absence of human dimensions. But the most boring thing about travelling by car is spending the evening in one of those tiny anonymous towns where there is absolutely nothing to do except to have it confirmed that the ennui of a small American town is exactly how it has always been described, or even worse. America keeps its promises: there is the bar with its wall adorned with hunting-trophies of deer and reindeer; in the public bar there are farmers with cowboy hats playing cards, a fat prostitute seducing a salesman, a drunk trying to start a fight. This squalor is not just to be found in the small anonymous towns but also, in a slightly more alluring form, in famous holiday centres like Monterey and Carmel; and there too in this dead season it is very difficult to find a restaurant that will serve dinner. (87-88)

Adventure of an Italian
In order to familiarize himself with the big city, the Italian newcomer spent the evenings going too one party after another, following people he did not know into houses owned by people he knew even less. Thanks to a very witty and intelligent actress, he ends up in the house of a beautiful singer from television, amid a rather commercial crowd of theatre people, impresarios, etc. He meets a young fellow-Italian who is an airplane steward who spends half his week in Rome, the other half in NY. When the Italian newcomer is about to take the actress back to her home, the steward suggests they form a foursome, and persuades the actress to invite along a rather pretty girl who is a cinema actress. The girl quickly agrees, the two Italians are already rubbing their hands as if everything was signed and sealed, and all they had to do was to decided on who takes which girl. But in the actress’s house the conversation turns to culture and progressive politics. By this stage it is clear that there will be no action. The girls are anything but stupid, even the Hollywood actress who at first seemed the usual starlet. It turns out that both are Russian and both Jewish. In the end the two Italians leave and the Hollywood actress stays to sleep with her friend. It turns out that they are both lesbians. The two Italians go out into the deserted, drizzling streets of New York at 5 in the morning. (pp29)

Do you think writers should be involved in politics? And how should they do so? To what political tendency do you belong?
I believe that all men should be involved in politics. And writers too, inasmuch as they are men. I believe that our civic and moral conscience should influence the man first and then the writer. It is a long road, but there is no other. And I believe that the writer must keep open a discourse which in its implications cannot but be political as well. I have remained faithful to these principles, and in the nearly twelve years of my membership of the Community Part, my conscience as a Communist and my conscience as a writer have not entered into those agonizing conflicts which have tormented many of my friends, making them believe that it was necessary to opt for either one conscience or the other. Everything that forces us to give up a part of ourselves is negative. I participate in politics and literature in different ways, according to my abilities, but both things interest me as forming one and the same discourse about humanity.
- Questionnaire, 1956 (pp12-13)

-Italo Calvino, Hermit in Paris: autobiographical writings

So what had the cinema meant to me in this context? I suppose: distance. It satisfied a need for distance, for an expansion of the boundaries of the real, for seeing immeasurable dimensions open up all around me, abstract as geometric entities, yet concrete too, crammed full of faces and situations and settings, which established an (abstract) network of relationships with the world of direct experience.
Since the war, cinema has been seen, discussed, made, in a completely different way. ... We no longer have one world within the brightly lit screen in the darkened theatre, and another heterogeneous world outside, the two being divided by a clean break, an ocean or abyss. The darkened theatre disappears, the screen becomes a magnifying glass placed on the routine world outside, forcing us to focus our attention on what the naked eye tends to skim over without settling on. This function has -- can have -- its usefulness, marginal, more substantial or occasionally very considerable. But it does not satisfy that anthropological and social need for distance.
- Italo Calvino, "A Cinema-Goer's Autobiography" pp. 60-61, The Road to San Giovanni.

...and it's pointless my trying to kindle a halo of feeling behind it with these words of commentary: all remains as it was then, those baskets were already dead then and I knew it, ghosts of a concreteness that had already disappeared, and I was already what I am, a citizen of cities and of history -- still without either city or history and suffering for it -- a consumer-- and victim - -of industrial products -- a candidate for consumerism, a freshly designated victim -- and already the lots were cast, all the lots, our own and everybody else's, yet what was this morning fury of my childhood, the fury that still persists in these not entirely sincere pages? Could everything perhaps have been different-- not very different but just enough to make the difference...? Might everything that is happening now perhaps have taken a different slant, in the world, in the history of civilization -- the losses not have been so absolute, the gains so uncertain?

- Italo Calvino, "The Road to San Giovanni" pp. 29-30, The Road to San Giovanni.

on pure image

French cinema was as heavy with smells as American films were light with Palmolive, polish and antiseptic. The women had a carnal presence that established them in the film-goer's mind as at once living women and erotic fantasies (Viviane Romance is the actress I'm thinking of here), while the eroticism of the Hollywood stars was sublimated, stylized, idealized. (Even the most carnal of the American actresses of the time, the platinum-blond Jean Harlow, was made unreal by the dazzling whiteness of her skin. In black-and-white the power of the white transfigured female faces, legs, shoulders and necks, making of Marlene Dietrich not so much an immediate object of desire but desire itself, seen as some extraterrestrial essence.) I sensed that French cinema was talking about things that were more disturbing and somehow forbidden....

- Italo Calvino, "A Cinema-Goer's Autobiography" pp. 49-50, The Road to San Giovanni.