Serenella Iovino, Gli animali di Calvino – Storie dall’antropocene

“With this highly original and delicate journey into animal otherness, Serenella Iovino guides us through the senselessness of the Anthropocene through the eyes and words of Italo Calvino, who was able to recognise these creatures as sisters in a larger and richer universe that we have stopped perceiving. Calvino makes us feel that we are not alone on the planet and that the impoverishment of the animal worlds is also our impoverishment”.

Telmo Pievani

“Calvino was much more than an advocate of animal rights: he was an advocate of animal worlds, made of stories and signs, of intensity, of desires. Looking at these worlds makes us better understand our own as well. And if (other) animals often seem so distant to us, perhaps it is only because deep down even humans are sometimes distant from themselves. This book is an invitation to come closer together and keep each other company”.

Serenella Iovino

From The Path of Spider’s Nests to Palomar, Italo Calvino never stopped telling stories about animals. But what do a colony of Argentinean ants in western Liguria, an albino gorilla in the Barcelona zoo, a hen in a Turin workshop, rebellious cats in an industrial city and a rabbit escaped from the clutches of vivisectors have in common? The answer is simple: they are all animals that tell us about us humans and the way in which our species has become so heavy on the Earth as to bring about a new geological age: the Anthropocene. Following in Calvino’s footsteps through the stories of these five seemingly improbable protagonists, Serenella Iovino tells us about an age in which the animal is menacing and threatened, and above all is not the totally ‘other’: because animals we are also, creatures in a world that challenges the balances, including political balances, of a difficult path of co-evolution.

Serenella Iovino is a full professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she inaugurated the first joint chair of Italian Studies and Environmental Humanities. An essayist, scholar of philosophy and literature, she is among the international protagonists of the debate on environmental humanities and ecocriticism. Among her books published in Italian: Filosofie dell’ambiente. Natura, etica, società (Carocci, 2004), Ecologia letteraria. Una strategia di sopravvivenza (Edizioni Ambiente, 2006), Paesaggio civile. Storie di ambiente, cultura e resistenza (il Saggiatore, 2022). He collaborates with the daily newspaper ‘la Repubblica’.