ABSTRACT
In regard to verbal or written images, Italo Calvino focuses not on the division between metaphors and descriptions, but on the potential visuality present in both, on the visual imagination's spatial and coloured images and their relation to words, their presence in the sands of writing. This chapter discusses the poetics and the signification of the written image as an aesthetic constituent of the text, in terms of the practice of description, reading, and interpretation. The praxis and the poetics of the image in Calvino unfold in the interaction between the gaze and the tension towards ekphrasis. The chapter looks at the importance of taking into account the written image when interpreting Calvino's texts. The moon and moonlight play an important role in Calvino's texts as expressions of poetological range, as emblems of certain qualities and tensions in his writing.
