Italo Calvino´s Le Citta Invisibili within the context of the italian visionary architecture on the sixties and seventies decades: Archizoom and Superestudio

Abstract

This article tries to throw light upon the relationship between Italo Clavino´s Le cittá invisibili and the utopian architecture from the sixties and seventies in Italy, mainly agglutinated around the Florentine groups Archizoom and Superstudio. The main appeal of the research lies in the exposure of a new hypothesis: the Italo Calvino´s book has not been the precursor of any visionary movement –as it´s commonly believed - but just the opposite, being Le cittá invisibili inserted within a pre-existent and strongly politicized discussion held in Italy at that moment, about the conception of the city. The originality of Italo Calvino´s work is that he approaches that discussion from a literary point of view, and not from an architectonical point of view, but, by no means, he constructed the beginning of a new artistic, architectonical, town planning movements. Given this peculiarity, will emerge one of the most interesting contemporary cases of ekphrastic interdisciplinary dialogue between architecture and literature