ABSTRACT
In setting out to write his first novel, the young Italo Calvino was conscious of having to fulfill certain conditions that were quite different from the established expectations of the genre. He had been particularly encouraged by Cesare Pavese, and also by Giansiro Ferrata, with the critic Emilio Cecchi in the background and Elio Vittorini slightly closer to home. Calvino was faced with the vertigo of the first enunciation of his style, but also with the temptation to evade this responsibility, and on the other hand he had to decide on characters, actions, narrative method, the authorial stance to adopt, and how he was to focus on reality. In the process of constructing images for The Path the essential thing was to use them to conceal the most significant elements of the narrative. In this context, Domenico Scarpa speaks of the fact that Calvino actually dissolves the most personally memorable and documentary moments into images.
