The essay reports, avoiding any prejudicial ideological mark, on the importance and richness in dialogue between literature and science adopted by Italo Calvino with the revolution of his cosmicomic short stories during the sixties, up to the philosophical prose of his most famous alter ego, Mr. Palomar; passing through the combinatorial attempts of the seventies (Città invisibili, Il castello dei destini incrociati, Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore).
This monographic study represents an accurate “research on method” in order to highlight and rebuild the coordinates of what could be defined “the Calvino system” (pointing out the several virtuous meetings between literature and science into the second Calvino’s work): that system that, made him unappealable guilty under the critic seal of literary virtuosity and of the de-responsibility game. It is an effort to rehabilitate the concrete specific weight of the second calvinian season, escaping from a pre-constituted categorization (engagement, postmodernism, etc)
