SOURCE: “Under Olivia's Teeth: Italo Calvino, Sotto il sole giaguaro,” in The Flavors of Modernity: Food and Novel, Princeton University Press, 1993, pp. 97–127.

In the following essay, Biasin focuses on the function of food in Calvino's work, particularly his story “Sotto il sole giaguaro.”

Italo Calvino published “Sapore sapere” in the elegant, luxurious review FMR in 1982, where his text accompanies the stupendous, disquieting images reproduced from the Florentine codex, in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, of the Historia General de las cosas de Nueva España, a sixteenth-century treatise on the life and customs of the Aztecs written by Fra Bernardino da Sahagún in the Nahuatl language.¹

Retitled “Sotto il sole giaguaro” (under the jaguar sun),² the story now appears in the book that bears its name. While the new title has lost the trajectory, in fact the cognitive short circuit of the two words sapore, flavor, and sapere...