SOURCE: “Introversion and Effacement in I racconti of Italo Calvino,” in Italica, Vol. 63, No. 4, Winter, 1986, pp. 331–45.

In the following essay, Ricci views the stories in I racconti as Calvino's early narrative experiments.

The Racconti of Italo Calvino—winner of the Premio Bagutta in 1959—is a collection of the author's short stories written between 1945 and 1958. The volume, 500 pages in length, is divided into four books: “Gli idilli difficili”; “Le memorie difficili”; “Gli amori difficili”; and “La vita difficile.” All contain stories previously published by the author.¹ Little attention has been paid the Racconti as experience of Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno and L'entrata in guerra, obvious autobiographical chronicles of the narrator's partisan experiences, of I nostri antentati, the satirical-allegorical-illuministic fables inspired by the author's moral vocation, and the socio-political vignette, La giornata di uno scrutatore, the Racconti is a text in which the protean capacity of Calvino's imagination...