«Un gomitolo di vere PAROLE»: la corrispondenza fra Italo Calvino e Domenico Rea (1955-1972)

The essay reconstructs the correspondence between Italo Calvino and Domenico Rea from 1955 to 1972 through documents preserved in the Einaudi Archives in Turin, the Rea Collection in Pavia, and the Calvino Collection at the National Library in Rome. The letters reveal an intense dialogue on the fate of the novel, on the short story as the privileged form of modernity, and on the role of the writer in postwar Italy. Alongside shared interests — from fairy tales to Neorealist fiction — two increasingly divergent trajectories gradually emerge: Calvino moving toward experimental and fragmented narrative forms, and Rea becoming ever more drawn to the novel while progressively isolated within the literary scene. The correspondence culminates in the “stone laid upon” of 1964, when Calvino abruptly interrupts the dialogue, marking the end of both a friendship and a shared reflection on contemporary narrative, a rupture that Rea would reaffirm in 1972.