Abstract

An Italian novel from the 1950s and an American short story written at the end of the century: which two works could be more distant if we consider chronology, cultural context and literary style? And yet, if we compare Italo Calvino's "The Baron in the Trees" and David Forster Wallace's "Forever Overhead", we may have the chance to re-read one of the classics of XX-century Italian fiction under an entirely unprecedented perspective. This new interpretation would shed light on the relationship between adolescence and verticality, vision and blindness, rise and fall, finitude and concatenation.