This is how Italo Calvino led the protest against the atomic bomb

On July 28, 1950, Italo Calvino wrote a postcard to his parents to inform them that he would not be in Sanremo on Sunday, as usual. He explained that he had to "go collect signatures against the atomic bomb." That day, in Turin, he was joined by Cesare Pavese and other comrades from the Communist Party. This was the so-called "Stockholm Appeal" for the total ban on atomic weapons, launched in a speech by Pietro Nenni at the Teatro Quirino in Rome. After all, the Los Alamos bomb had been created, at least initially, in Italy, on Via Panisperna, where a group of young physicists, led by Enrico Fermi , had begun experimentation before emigrating to America because of the racial laws. Hannah Arendt had already noted this in a 1954 essay on the bomb: Europe continued to consider the nuclear issue a foreign policy issue, while it was European scientists, especially Italians, who had been decisive in the creation of the "doomsday" weapon.

Maria Anna Mariani has reconstructed in depth for the first time in a book, Italy and the Bomb: Literature in the Nuclear Age (Il Mulino), the history of the relationship between Italian writers and intellectuals and the deadly weapon. Perhaps only in our country, with the exception of Japan's Hiroshima and Nagasaki , was there such a thorough and sustained mobilization and discussion throughout the post-World War II period. The reasons are twofold: the presence of a strong Communist Party and, at the same time, the Catholic Church, whose headquarters were in Rome.

The authors considered by the University of Chicago scholar are, in order: Moravia, Calvino, Morante, Sciascia, Pasolini, and Cassola , but also other essayists and writers who complement this group of important authors of our literature. Calvino himself was one of the first to insist on this theme in a much-cited article that appeared in l'Unità in 1946: "The Goats Are Watching Us." This text also explored the relationship between the human and animal worlds: "Have you ever wondered what the goats in Bikini were thinking? And the cats in the bombed-out houses? And the dogs in a war zone? And the fish when the torpedoes exploded?"

Calvino's work isn't limited to this one, but includes a series of other articles dedicated to the atomic bomb, culminating in a 1977 piece on the N-bomb: "The Right Men with the Right Things." Then there's a 1954 story, "The Sleeping Bomb in the Woods," already imbued with a surreal and fantastical flair, which would lead to Le cosmicomiche in the 1960s. This book, as Mariani demonstrates, is anything but an escape from reality, but rather a committed reflection on the contemporary world using the tools of estrangement—comedy and fantasy—as well as a stylistic invention based on the Proteus and palindrome Qfwfq, a character both prehuman and posthuman.

It's a political book that disproves much of the popular belief that Calvino is a writer of frivolity and disengagement, especially beloved by leftist literary critics, who have a natural dislike for him. Even more than the quintessential anti-power writer, the Sicilian Leonardo Sciascia , an author with a "rigid moral framework," both Enlightenment and Baroque, the Ligurian writer has long held the bar at the center of his own struggle against nuclear weapons.

The Racalmuto-born writer's book, The Disappearance of Majorana , published in 1975, for its part sparked a discussion in Italian newspapers, including the survivors of the Via Panisperna school. Despite being based, as has been demonstrated, on highly questionable historical and argumentative assumptions—its main source is Robert Jungk's 1958 book, The Sorcerer's Apprentice: A History of Atomic Scientists , published by Einaudi—and on the creation of a Majorana myth, almost a saint, it is the book that rekindled a broad discussion in Italy, where American bases with their nuclear warheads were deployed, on the past of atomic scientists, and at the same time on the future of the balance of terror.

But already in 1965 at the Carignano Theatre in Turin Elsa Morante presented her theses verbally, which later became the text entitled For or against the atomic bomb , aimed against the justification of the "deterrent strategy", an essay published in volume only in 1987 by Adelphi, although already known to scholars.

Elsa showed how the continuous "machinations of the industrial complex become perceptible only in the acute phase of crisis, disappearing from public attention for the rest of the time" (Mariani).

Even figures of great intellectual prominence such as Ernesto de Martino and Norberto Bobbio had raised the question in the 1950s and 1960s of how the H-bomb was not just a weapon of war, but rather the sure instrument for the extinction of the human race on Earth. The author of the future best-selling novel History (1974) had highlighted the destructive will inherent in human civilization, uniting Auschwitz and Hiroshima, rationality and destructive domination in a single reasoning.

Morante's work specifically highlights the impossibility of compassion, a sentiment specific to witnesses not directly affected by the events of war. The writer proposes the theme of art's salvific role in the face of the threat of extermination of the planet's inhabitants, a theme that also inspired Pier Paolo Pasolini .

The poet and director's contribution is entrusted to a curious and interesting montage film: La rabbia (The Rage), 1962-63. Pasolini's visual juxtaposition of the figure of Marilyn Monroe and that of the atomic explosion is entrusted in the film with the task of shaking up "the clouded collective imagination."

Today, returning to the great names of our literature, and to their ideas and debates, is not only a historiographical act, but a political gesture in a world that has already exploded, well before we even begin, as we fear, to deploy the doomsday bomb.