Calvino e Ariosto: un ménage à trois? L’influenza del Corriere dei Piccoli e del Bertoldo sulla scrittura calviniana

This article reflects on Italo Calvino’s relationship with Ludovico Ariosto, a topic on which much has already been written. Here, however, I neither examine Calvino’s borrowings from Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, nor do I focus on images, events, or atmospheres in Calvino’s works that might be labeled “Ariostesque.” Instead, I begin with the recognition that Calvino employs irony in a way distinct from Ariosto, moving beyond it into realms of parody, the surreal, the grotesque, and the absurd. On this basis, it is reasonable to assume that Calvino’s sources of irony extend beyond Ariosto. My analysis examines Corriere dei Piccoli and Bertoldo, two journals that Calvino read avidly during his childhood and adolescence and that he acknowledged as formative influences; I consider them in relation to The Cloven Viscount and The Non-Existent Knight. By integrating visual and textual sources, I identify creative practices that migrate from the pages of Corriere dei Piccoli and Bertoldo into Calvino’s writings. This demonstrates that Calvino’s relationship with Ariosto was shaped by additional sources, whose influence became evident well before he acknowledged it in the early 1960s.