Abstract

This essay explores Italo Calvino's relationship with his books and the books of others, which in time appeared on his shelves, and defines Calvino's idea of library, the library he himself built in 1980 when he moved from Paris to Rome. This library, still kept in the author's apartment and now explored for the first time, presents itself as a "system," a conceptual map that projects and intersects the map of the inner library as told in Six Memos for the Next Millennium.