Italo Calvino, 100th anniversary of his birth: matches, Olympics and bets

Betting, football and a certain Qfwfq. No, wait, the illegal plays of the players under investigation in Turin have nothing to do with it. However, it has something to do with a gentleman called Italo Calvino: if he were alive today, 15 October 2023, he would have been one hundred years old. He was one of the greatest Italian writers. A guy who is actually not very sporty, and yet every now and then, among half-sized viscounts, paths of spiders’ nests, invisible cities, barons in the trees, invisible cities, non-existent knights, poisonous mushrooms collected by his Marcovaldo and American lessons, the very rich sample of his literature , here we begin to see a bicycle, an Olympic opening ceremony and even a ball. An ageless ball, a ball from when football didn’t exist, indeed “there was nothing that could predict anything”. For us, let’s confess, it was a discovery. The approach of the centenary had brought back, as often happens, the desire to read, especially to reread. Something that we should have time to do and that instead we always put aside, not understanding that the second reading of things is the one that gets inside you.

Calvin’s field

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The fact is that it was at that moment that, while reading “Le cosmicomiche”, we came across this dispute between bettors, on one side the casual Qfwfq, on the other the more embarrassed Dean (k)yK. It happened after the question about planets: “on which one will an atmosphere form: Mercury? Venus? Earth? Mars? Go ahead and make up your mind,” says Qfwfq, inviting the Dean to take new bets. And it is here that the non-football fan Calvino incredibly enters onto a playing field from which we thought he was far away: “The time I almost absentmindedly dropped the question: – Arsenal-Real Madrid, in the semi-final, Arsenal plays at home, who wins? – in an instant I understood that with what seemed like a casual jumble of words I had touched on an infinite reserve of new combinations between the signs that compact, opaque and uniform reality would use to disguise its monotony, and perhaps the race towards the future, that race that I was the first to have foreseen and hoped for, tended towards nothing else through time and space than a crumbling into alternatives like these, until it dissolved into a geometry of invisible triangles and bounces like the path of the ball between the white lines of the field as I tried to imagine traced at the bottom of the luminous vortex of the planetary system, deciphering the numbers marked on the chest and back of nocturnal players unrecognizable in the distance”. But yes, the protagonist narrator Qfwfq runs through the millions of years looking for things to bet on and stumbles upon a football match, a kind of metaverse long before the debut of this word in the language. So yes, them, Arsenal and Real Madrid, Calvino’s match.

the match I didn’t see

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In truth, he encountered more than one match. Strange matches, matches always experienced from an angle that is not the classic one. “The match I haven’t seen”, a 1948 Italy-England match in Turin that Calvino describes for “L’Unità”, without however seeing it. He remains outside, we don’t know by choice or perhaps due to denied accreditation or a ticket not purchased. And at that point, here he is, making a virtue of necessity and telling us about that hope that slowly fades… “Then the sun won. Italy doesn’t, unfortunately. Carosio’s voice spread on all the streets, even those who wanted to act indifferent ended up stopping at the crooks at every bar. “It’s online!”. “She entered! Italy scored.” “Whatever that referee!” We too cursed him outside, clenching our fists.” It almost seems like we can see him lounging around perhaps with a notebook, scrutinizing a world that is not his own, but with his already trained imagination as a “squirrel of the pen”, as his great companion from his Turin years, Cesare Pavese, defined him.

nurmi’s shirts

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These were the years in which Calvino had not yet reached the crossroads, journalism still coexisted with his debut in literature. And it took sport to say: come on, go there. It happened in Helsinki, at the 1952 Olympics, that of Emil Zatopek’s hat-trick on the 5000-10000-Marathon axis. Calvino was there for “L’Unità” and someone had the idea of ​​sending him and mixing a not particularly sporty intellectual with the Olympics with the secretary of the Italian Communist Party at the time, Palmiro Togliatti. The fact is that he is there, at the Olympic stadium, and sees Paavo Nurmi, the legendary winner of the 1920s, a legend of Finnish sport, in the “pink and plump” post-records and medals version as he carries the torch towards the tripod according to the ritual of the Games. A moment, just a moment of glory to return to normality. “The re-enactment of him was over, Mr Nurmi was back, selling shirts in a shop in the centre”.

the pirate water polo players

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Then, here is Dordoni’s triumph in the walk, the water polo match between Italy and India in which our opponents “look like Salgari’s pirates”, until the last article in which he takes leave of Helsinki with more than one regret, as if if a fairy tale had ended and a time of life had to be put behind us. Just at that moment, Calvino understands that journalism is not for him, he needs a different time and space. He confesses it when he says that yes, sharing those days at the stadium with Paolo Monelli, correspondent for “La Stampa”, had somehow made him aware that that approach to the story was not his. Calvino helped his neighbor, guiding him into the Olympic atmosphere, look this way, look that way, then the next day he discovered – this he said – that Monelli had been much more capable than him of grounding the pulsating emotions of those moments .

the “deluded”

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Calvino’s dream, better his aspiration than dream is a word too inflated to sew it on him without permission, was about words. Putting them in a row, ordering them, playing with them, using them in the most appropriate way, combining them with imagination, lightening them, multiplying them, he would write many years later. He had written about it in a short story when he just came of age, “The train of deluded people”. It was a particular moment for Calvino, described by himself in the story “The Nights of the Unpa”: “Suddenly in 1940, I wrote a comedy in three acts, I had a love affair and I learned to ride a bicycle”. Rather late to be honest. But who are the “deluded” ones? A group of characters in a third class compartment of a train where a fairy arrives and begins to ask about the hopes of each of her travel companions. And there is a similar Calvino with his desire to write, but also a young cyclist who dreams of participating in the Giro d’Italia…

by bike

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Cycling is a sport that recurs in his early stories. He argues with Catholic Action which would like to appropriate Bartali’s victories and says that “Bartali’s victories belong to everyone”. Then, to explain his renunciation of the Viareggio prize, a few years later, he borrows a metaphor from the two wheels: “The prizes are now cycling races”. The bike also appears later, in front of the sea in Castiglione della Pescaia, his holiday resort. But every now and then he varied on the topic. He put the bike down and followed another thread. Does anyone remember the professor in “If on a winter’s night a traveller” who goes jogging for an hour a day and is caught in a dilemma that gives him no peace when he hears the ringing of a telephone from a house? He doesn’t appear to be a Calvino runner, but a little, in describing the jogger professor, he must have felt a curiosity towards that world of solitary athletes, the thing he liked most about running. Where “everyone goes on their own and doesn’t have to answer to anyone”. Without wondering about Arsenal-Barcelona anymore…