ABSTRACT
The first colour which appears in Italo Calvino's narrative works is the yellow of the sun. In the opening lines of The Path to the Spiders' Nests, his first novel, published in 1947, the writer describes a narrow, tight and closed space: the alley where Pin lives. In The Path, colours relate to three different semantic fields and to three different 'objects': people, animals and the landscape. Pin's world is thus divided between these polarities: city vs. countryside, people vs. animals. The yellow, or gold, of the sun and the dark blue of the sky are the two colours, probably derived from Montale, that dominate. The novel contains a duality of colour: on the one hand, grey world of the alley and in particular of the inn where the adults whom Pin hangs around with congregate, and on the other the colourful world of the Ligurian Riviera landscape, the world of adventure and danger in which Pin soon immerses himself.
