Sedimenting Stories: Italo Calvino and the Extraordinary Strata of the Anthropocene

In this essay, I suggest to read the sedimenting phases of the Anthropocene by using the oeuvre of Italo Calvino as an imaginative companion to geological processes. Exploring his early writings, I try to show how literature captured the environmental processes preparing the Anthropocene, thus providing—like a sort of “narrative stratigrapher”—a gradual disclosure of this new post-geological epoch. At the same time, I also invite to see how Italy was the material text in which the Anthropocene was being inscribed. If apocalypse means revelation, this literature will be therefore apocalyptic in the real sense, co-emerging with the Italian as well as global landscape of the “Great Acceleration” and evolving with the ecological parable of the Anthropocene, from its “Golden Spike” to what we see in and around us today.