Sedimenting Stories: Italo Calvino and the Extraordinary Strata of the Anthropocene Serenella Iovino Abstract
In this essay, I suggest to read the sedimenting phases of the Anthropocene by using the oeuvre of Italo Calvino as an imaginative companion to geological processes. Exploring his early writings, I try to show how literature captured the environmental processes preparing the Anthropocene, thus providing—like a sort of “narrative stratigrapher”—a gradual disclosure of this new post-geological epoch. At the same time, I also invite to see how Italy was the material text in which the Anthropocene was being inscribed. If apocalypse means revelation, this literature will be therefore apocalyptic in the real sense, co-emerging with the Italian as well as global landscape of the “Great Acceleration” and evolving with the ecological parable of the Anthropocene, from its “Golden Spike” to what we see in and around us today.
Keywords Anthropocene, Italo Calvino, Italy, Material Ecocriticism, Cultural Ecology



The Anthropocene is a quiet apocalypse. It does not come with a meteorite from outer space, but it crawls slowly into the planet’s systems from within. Via the technosphere, it infiltrates the atmosphere, the biosphere, the lithosphere and, moving all the way up to the semiosphere, it reveals this simple truth: we have become sedimenting agents, makers of new fossils and new fossils in-the-making.1 Sediment, however, takes time to become legible. Is it like reading a book starting from the finale: only after it is concluded, the story eventually appears before your eyes. This depends on the fact that, when we deal with geological categories, we always see the end result, but we never see the intermediate phases, and the “epoch of the human” is no exception. All this poses a hermeneutical challenge, whose major task appears not so much to be “how do we read the Anthropocene?” but rather “how do we understand this sedimentation process?” Or, differently said, “how can we follow the episodes of the story while—and not just after—the story itself sediments?” Such issue can be addressed from various angles, and literature is one of these. Literature, in fact, has the capacity to interact with the world’s dynamics: it is, as Hubert Zapf says, a “sensorium” of historical processes—both social and ecological (Zapf 2002, p. 64). Working as a “seeing instrument” for things otherwise difficult to detect, it provides revelations, helping the bodily texts of the world to disclose their narratives.2 In this essay, I suggest to read the sedimenting phases of the Anthropocene by using the oeuvre of Italo Calvino as an imaginative companion to geological processes. Exploring his early writings, I try to show how literature captured the environmental processes preparing the Anthropocene, thus providing—like a sort of “narrative stratigrapher”—a gradual disclosure of this new post-geological epoch. At the same time, I also invite to see how Italy was the material text in which the Anthropocene was being inscribed. If apocalypse means revelation, this literature will be therefore apocalyptic in the real sense, co-emerging with the Italian as well as global landscape of the “Great Acceleration” and evolving with the ecological parable of the Anthropocene, from its “Golden Spike” to what we see in and around us today.3 S. Iovino (*) Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and Modern Cultures, University of Turin, 10124 Turin, Italy e-mail: serenella.iovino@unito.it 1 On this point, see LeMenager (forthcoming). The definition of literature as “seeing instrument” is in Adamson 2001, p. 145. See also Adamsons (2016a). 3 On apocalyptic narratives and their importance for the environmental humanities, see Rigby (2015). 2 In my interpretation, I move along two concurring frameworks: material ecocriticism and cultural ecology. Based on the idea that phenomena result from physical and semiotic intraactions of human and nonhuman agencies, material ecocriticism maintains that matter can be read as a text, and that each of our encounters with the world—including literary creation and critical interpretation—is a form of diffraction, an interference that “can make a difference in how meanings are made and lived” (Haraway 1997, p. 14).4 On the other hand, cultural ecology, elaborated by Hubert Zapf and Peter Finke on the ground of Gregory Bateson’s ecology of mind, suggests that the ecology of matters and the ecology of ideas of a society are dynamically interrelated, resulting in the capacity of literature to materially liaise with social imagination and hence provide creative energies of self-renewal.5 In that it “highlights the indissoluble interconnectedness and dynamic feedback relations between culture and nature, mind and matter, text and life” (Zapf 2016, p. 86), a combination of these two theoretical horizons might indeed be a very fruitful way to explore the joint creativity of human and nonhuman actors in both its imaginative and political applications.6 That was my premise. Now, let us delve into the Anthropocene’s multifaceted layers. Layers of the Anthropocene The Anthropocene is all about layers. This is both a chronological and ontological question. Its “Golden Spike” for example, namely, the point within a stratal section where a difference between two geological phases is clearly visible, is still debated. Following Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer (2000), many scholars propose to situate this boundary around 1800 CE, coinciding with the emergence of Industrial Revolution; others, in turn, go back to approximately 12.000 years ago, when the so-called “Neolithic revolution” and the rise of agriculture took place—which would mean, to paraphrase Bruno Latour, that we have never been Holocenic.7 Probably the most accredited stance (this the opinion of Jan Zalasiewicz, head of the Anthropocene Working Group of the Internal Commission on Stratigraphy8) is that we should start counting from 1945-50, a period marking the “spread of radionuclides from atmospheric nuclear weapon tests” and the skyrocketing increase in “the use of natural resources and the emission of pollutants” known as the “Great Acceleration” (Zalasiewicz et al 2016, p. 15). Whatever its birthdate, however, the Anthropocene’s boundaries are blurred by definition—and here comes ontology. Because its sediment has many faces, and its layers tie together all planetary systems. The Anthropocene is stratified in the ground and in the lithic record, with the impressive scale of urban growth and soil erosion; in the air, with changes affecting the chemistry of the atmosphere and the warming climate; in the biosphere, with species moving along with goods and the dramatic mass extinctions currently affecting living forms at an unparalleled rate.9 The interesting feature of the Anthropocene, indeed, is not so much that one living species has become a geological force—life and geology have always been deeply entangled—but that for the first time in the earth’s history social practices (techno-industrial processes, military challenges of Machtpolitik, use and consumption habits, economic fluxes) have become part of the geological record, inscribing themselves into all planetary spheres and impacting the carrying capacity of ecological systems. The forces 4 See also Iovino (2015) and Iovino and Oppermann (2014a), pp. 9-10. On material ecocriticism, see Iovino and Oppermann (2014). 5 For an articulated explanation of cultural ecology, see Zapf (2016) and Zapf (2016a). 6 On the relationship between material ecocriticism and cultural ecology, see Iovino (2012), pp. 61-64 and Zapf (2016), pp. 81-88. 7 On this chronological attribution, see Ruddiman (2003). 8 Details at http://www.quaternary.stratigraphy.org.uk/workinggroups/anthropocene (1 November 2016). 9 See Zalasiewicz (2016). On mass extinction, see among others Dawson (2016), Heise (2016), and Kolbert (2014). underlying this alleged new epoch are therefore “a settling out of matter […] layer upon layer, by a hybrid agency both aqueous and cultural, material and semiotic” (LeMenager, forthcoming). This means that the Anthropocene is both a landscape and a discourse, a vibrant composition of corporeal elements and of socio-political narratives: it is the quintessential example of “storied matter.”10 Examined in their ontology, the “extraordinary strata” of the Anthropocene, as Zalasiewicz (2016) calls them, are thus at once physical and cultural. The Anthropocene, in other words, is stratified outside as well as inside us; it is both a state of things and a state of mind. Its geology, in fact, “does not refer exclusively to the ground under our feet. It is constitutive of social and technological relations as well as environmental and ecological realities” (Parikka 2014, Ch. 2). For the first time, all these relations are readable in ice cores and scientists are faced with the appearance of post-geological rocks and future fossils, such as the “enormous city-structures that make up the urban strata, and […] novel material such as plastics and aluminium and the extraordinary diverse and rapidly evolving technofossils […] into which they are shaped” (Zalasiewicz 2016, p. 123). Enormous city structures, novel materials, technofossils—and around them urban pollution, consumption and production, waste accumulation, hierarchal accumulation of wealth, and social discrimination… It is impossible not to see here that the map of the Anthropocene is physically shaped by the same dynamics of violence and unequal protection that mold the maps of environmental justice, and is not by accident that some propose to name it “Capitalocene.”11 In fact, its strata are also social strata, because, despite the “melancholic exultation” for the “becoming-geological” of our species, in this epoch “[n]ot all humans are allotted an equal share of humanity” (Cohen 2016, p. 26). As Marco Armiero suggests in his essay “Of the Titanic, the Bounty, and Other Shipwrecks,” we might well say that we are all on the same boat, but the truth is that, on this boat, not all of us are all first-class travellers: “Class matters in the Anthropocene” (Armiero 2015, p. 52). The Anthropocene can thus be read also in the way it stratifies in human bodies, namely, in how these bodies respond to unequally distributed geo-social challenges. This also implies that we can no longer afford to keep geology separated from political ecology: the Anthropocene is all about biopolitics. But the Anthropocene “body politic” is much wider than the human body: it includes the built environment as well as forests, body cells and vegetation, endangered animals and melting glaciers; it entails issues of political freedoms and individual wellbeing, as well as energy democracy and global pollution. For this reason, and in spite of its name, the only perspective from which the Anthropocene can be read in all its articulations is necessarily a postanthropocentric one. This post-anthropocentric biopolitical perspective has a privileged embodiment in the landscape. A complex reality made of territories and processes, of elements and bodies, of “myriad intra-active entities-in-assemblages” (Haraway 2015, p. 160), the landscape of the Anthropocene is easy to visualize. It is a space occupied by continuous cities swallowed by their own metabolism; it is a territory covered in rubble or shrouds of concrete; a land often described by the maps of extractivist frenzy in which the earth, like a huge chunk of cheese, is not only swathed by an asphalt-and-concrete crust, but also full of empty holes. It is the atmospheric landscape of both industrial pollution and radiation—plutonium and radium that infiltrate our bodies; it is an ecosystem occupied by alien species, a place in which “nature” is 10 On this point, see Serpil Oppermann’s article “The Scale of the Anthropocene: Material Ecocritical Reflections,” forthcoming in the journal Mosaic. Clarifying the role of material ecocriticism in the interpretation of the Anthropocene as a “storied” material-semiotic dimension, Oppermann writes: “To counteract [the] disorienting framing of the Anthropocene, material ecocriticism reads the world through its narrative agencies that are thick with material-discursive archives of survivals and extinctions, always confounding the human. […] Rethinking the storied expanse of the Anthropocene makes us more perceptive to climate patterns, chemical compounds, geological formations, and myriad other material agencies that are never silent.” 11 See for example Haraway (2015) and Moore (2013). so fuzzy and so far out of sight that it is hard for little children to recognize a real tree or a real cow. It is a landscape in which everybody is jointly liable to some extent— but in which some pay a higher price than others for this eco-geological shift. This landscape closely resembles the one that Calvino depicted in The Invisible Cities or, as we shall see, in many of his earlier “urban” works, like Marcovaldo, Smog, and A Plunge into Real Estate. Stories and Layers of the Italian Anthropocene Calvino’s literary constructions are visionary per definition. But they are also an excellent “sensorium” to perceive the world’s dynamics of his time, both on a local and a global sphere. This makes Calvino a particularly interesting subject for environmental criticism. In his works, especially in those written from the second half of the 1940s to the early 1960s, we find all the Anthropocene’s “extraordinary strata”: atmosphere, soil, biosphere, society. However, it is also important to remark that Calvino’s narratives, and even his most audacious constructions, have a precise material horizon. As Monica Seger writes, Calvino “anticipates a very twenty-first century debate on local versus global environmental realities. On the other hand, his work is firmly rooted in the Italy of his day, a country experiencing industrial growth just as it grapples with notions of national identity and transnational allegiance a decade into the Cold War” (Seger 2015, p. 27). Calvino’s imagination, in other words, is deep-seated into Italian ground—and it is within, on, and around this ground that those layers—and their stories—sediment. Italy joins the Anthropocene landscape after the second World War. Cities change, economy changes, industry is “reloaded,” and here, too, the Great Acceleration begins. Increasingly, the destruction wrought on the peninsula by bombs—whether dropped by former friends or former foes—is followed by the destruction wrought by reconstruction. With dramatic speed, after being for centuries and a living repository of collective memory, the landscape ceases to be a common good and, more and more often, is turned into a “passive resource” for building developers (Settis 2013, p. 11).12 Industrial development is also at once bearer of economic growth and socio-environmental harms. In the northern industrial outskirts, where immigration, exploited labor and poor housing go hand in hand, pollution infiltrates the air and other elements exposing people at different levels of risk: class matters, in the (Italian) Anthropocene. Faraway from industrial centers, in apparently still bucolic settings, alien species invade autochthonous ecosystems, and the atomic radiation of war- and peacetime bombs, travelling through planetary skies since 1945, occupies the global landscapes of bodies and discourses, reverberating in Italy, too. Italo Calvino perceives all these mutations around him and, although obviously unaware of their geological implications, he seems to be quite cognizant of the eco-environmental ones. His testimony begins in the same period of Zalasiewicz’s “Golden Spike.” In the short piece “Le capre ci guardano” (1946), commenting on the Operation “Crossroad”—in which the Bikini Atoll was used by the US as a “nuclear firing range”—the 23-year-old intellectual draws attention to the animals sacrificed in the experiment, and in wars in general. He writes: Have you ever asked yourselves what the goats on Bikini must have thought? And the cats in bombed houses? And the dogs in war zones? And the fish struck by torpedoes? How must have they judged us humans in those moments, in their logic—which exists and, although more simple, is […] a much more humane logic? (Calvino 2001, vol. I, pp. 2131–2. My translation.) 12 On this point, see De Lucia (2013), Settis (2012), Cederna (2013), and Iovino (2016). The stance, ethically and ontologically, is post-anthropocentric from the outset. One immediately understands that Calvino’s point of view is that of those goats. But what one also understands is that the scope of his perspective is wide. And this is what makes the report on Bikini’s goats historically apocalyptic. Providing a large-scale setting for his Italian stories, Calvino’s article indeed entails in nuce the revelation of what will happen very soon to living species and to the global atmosphere in a landscape drowned by “social and technological relations” (Parikka 2014, Ch. 2)—which are also ipso facto relations of power. We see this with clarity in Smog, a short novel of 1958 that opens a window on the atmospheric layer of the Italian Anthropocene. Here Calvino tells the story of a journalist who lives in a northern industrial city swallowed by pollution, unquestionably modeled on Turin. This anonymous young man writes for Purification, a pseudo-environmental magazine aimed at “reassuring” the population about the effects of industrial “smog.” Listing almost all pollutants that foul the atmosphere at the time of the Great Acceleration, the journal’s subtitle, indeed, sounds: “of the Air from Smoke, from Chemical Exhaust, and from the Products of Combustion” (Calvino 1983, p. 123). Paradox is the novel’s pivot: whereas the protagonist is forced to verbally counter and even “mitigate” the intensity of atmospheric pollution, smog is as a matter of fact a ubiquitous molecular presence saturating literally every corner, especially in and around the his body. Looking at the sky, he can clearly distinguish the smog cloud that wraps the urban agglomerate: It was […] a shadow of dirt, soiling everything and changing […] its very consistency, because it was heavy, not clearly dispelled from the earth, from the speckled expanse of the city over which it flowed slowly, gradually erasing it on one side and revealing it on the other, but trailing a wake, like slightly dirty strands, which had no end. (Calvino 1983, p. 139) Even more paradoxical, however, is that Purification, as the official organ of a phantomatic “Institute for the Purification of the Urban Atmosphere in Industrial Centers” (IPUAIC), is issued by the same multinational corporation that produces the all-pervading contaminants, and whose goal is to manipulate information about the state of the air. The corporation is therefore responsible for a double, material and discursive pollution, an affront not only limited to this unspecified city. The protagonist perfectly realizes that he is working for the “smog master” and that IPUAIC, like Purification, is “a creature of the smog, born of the need to give those working to produce the smog some hope of a life that was not all smog, and yet, at the same time, to celebrate its power” (Calvino 1983, p. 145). In an incredibly prophetic passage, the journalist, whose article on atomic radiation in the atmosphere has just been censored by the chief editor, says: The cloud of smog now seemed to have grown smaller, a tiny little puff, a cirrus, compared to the looming atomic mushroom. […] I avoided any mention of atomic explosions or radioactivity in the headlines, but in each number I tried to slip some information on the subject […]. I had a file where I kept all the material concerning nuclear radiation, because as I read through the papers […] I always found something on that subject and saved it. […] So every day my eye fell upon statistics of terrible diseases, stories about fishermen overtaken in the middle of the ocean by lethal clouds, guinea pigs born with two heads after some experiments with uranium. (Calvino 1983, pp. 155-156) And, anticipating climate change, he adds: The normal order of the seasons seemed changed, intense cyclones coursed over Europe, the beginning of summer was marked by days heavily charged with electricity, then by weeks of rain, by sudden heat waves and sudden resurgences of […] cold. The papers denied that these atmospheric disorders could be in any way connected with the effects of the bomb; only a few solitary scientists seemed to sustain this notion […]. (156) Although the hypothesis that there might be links between global warming and atomic radiation is not supported today by climatologists, the debate on possible climatic alterations, especially in the form of a “nuclear winter,” has been for a while a lively one.13 Sensible to the intertwined mutations in the landscape of elements and powers, however, Calvino saw the many changes occurring above and around him, and his stories reflect the connecting dots of this material narrative. And elsewhere he was also further connecting the dots of transcorporeal relations between technosphere and biosphere. In a novel titled The Watcher (1963), set in a Turin hospital for physically and mentally disabled people, he openly asked what happens in the long run to human genes when they are exposed to the effects of invisible anthropogenic forces: what unpredictable metamorphoses does “the material of human race” risk “each time it reproduces itself”? How exposed it is to “the risk [...] which is multiplied by the number of the new snares: the viruses, poisons, uranium radiation”? (Calvino 1971, pp. 17-18) Here Calvino was explicit: this risk is not only a threat for individuals, but also a “path evolution might yet take, […] if atomic radiations do act on the cells that control the traits of the species” (21). If the Anthropocene changes the stories embedded in the DNA of living beings, this cellular and evolutionary stratum is yet another storied layer of this geological epoch. Written in the wake of the atomic era, therefore, The Watcher is a trip in a “city” of potential human aliens, both inside and outside a Turin sanatorium.14 While the atmosphere was becoming saturated with pollutants old and new, under the sky a crust of concrete was forming, thickening the Anthropocene’s stratigraphy: and here comes the lithic stratum. This is the subject of A Plunge into Real Estate (1957). With remarkable accuracy, this short novel mirrors a historical watershed in the phenomenology of the Italian landscape, completely redesigned by the forces operating in the post-war economic boom. The interesting point of the story is that the rise and expansion of the new layer of concrete on the peninsula’s body represents the rise of new financial powers as well: the landscape’s mutation is also linked to an anthropological mutation, itself related to novel and unexpected complicities.15 Here, for example, we see ex-partisans become contractors and intellectuals become speculators who, in spite of ideology, values, or family traditions, now enter into business together. The protagonist Quinto converts indeed his discomfort about the cementification of “his district, that amputated part of himself” into an insight that marks per se the Golden Spike of the beginning of a new epoch: “If everybody’s building, why don’t we build, too?”, he says to his brother Ampelio. “Oh, no, my poor garden!”—cries their mother (Calvino 1983, p. 166). But, as the reader sadly realizes over the narrative, she belongs decidedly to another geological time. From the very beginning of the novel, indeed, one can observe that the transformation affecting places (here the Riviera Ligure, and notably Calvino’s hometown Sanremo) is something more than simply a reconfiguration of the built environment. It is a complete naturalcultural metamorphosis that starts like a local infection— “The Riviera was gripped by a fever of cement” (Calvino 1983, p. 163)—and then spreads, finally taking siege of the land, that ends up “being overwhelmed by cement” (165). The novel opens with a provincial vision, whose limited scope does not make it less uncanny: 13 See for example Turco et al (1983). See also UNSCEAR (2010). For an ecocritical interpretation of this novel, see Iovino (2011). 15 See on this point the classical essay of Antonio Cederna, I vandali in casa (1956). 14 In the little towns on the terraced hillsides the new buildings played piggyback with one another […], the bulldozers were churning up the soil […], picks were demolishing the two-story residences, the ax was at the broad-leaved palm trees, which fell with a papery scrunch from the sky so soon to be filled by the desirable, three-room, all-convenience, sunny homes of tomorrow. (Calvino 1983, p. 164) After a while, however, we understand that this perverse makeover is not affecting a mere portion of the landscape, but is literally mutating its life. The territory, indeed, “had taken on a new life, abnormal and graceless perhaps, but for that very reason […] it was more alive than never before” (Calvino 1983, p. 166, emphasis in the original). This hybrid “new life” of the territory is a mix of human and material agency, an unprecedented combination of disordered urban development and specific territorial features that will lead to today’s hydro-geological unbalances affecting Italy in general and the Liguria region in particular. According to the ISPRA Report 2015 on hydro-geological risk, in fact, 57,9% of the region’s territory is at risk of landslides and other disasters, with a level of danger from moderated to extreme (ISPRA 2015). The risk depends on a mix of factors: deforestation, abandonment of former areas of agricultural land, and above all excessive building development. Sometimes constructions are even erected on previous riverbeds. Combined with the effects of climate change and the high levels of seismicity, this leads to periodic floods, landslips, and structural collapses, which are major causes of social distress and one of the major drains on public funds. It will not be useless to notice that, from 1941 to 1961 the number of new buildings in Italy literally skyrocketed. As described by the WWF dossier 2009: L’anno del cemento, from 1956 to 2001 the urbanized surface in Italy has increased by 500% and the yearly consumption of soil amounted to 244.000 hectares (WWF 2009). According to the National Institute of Statistics, between 1990 and 2005 the surface of agricultural soil in Italy suffered a decrease of 3 million and 663 hectares. In spite of a clear demographic decline, every day in Italy 161 hectares of land are covered with concrete (cf. Settis 2013, p. 10). Whether legally or illegally, this trend is continuing relentlessly. Being one of the most cementified regions in Italy, in Liguria these figures, whose causes were being determined as Calvino was writing A Plunge into Real Estate, are even more discouraging, also because the building expansion described in the novella is historically accurate. As Seger specifies, during the 1950s “Liguria boasted one of the highest rates of Italian housing development, along with Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna. In 1959, for example, more than 50 dwellings were built in the region for every 1,000 residents. As a measure of comparison, Tuscany gained 30 to 40 new dwellings from every 1,000 residents” (Seger 2015, p. 30). In contrast with today’s uninterrupted megalopolis of concrete, as Calvino clearly understood it, all this was the clear beginning of a post-humane urban landscape. But the landscape of the Anthropocene is not only above-ground and not only urban— especially because one of the features of this epoch is that it “unnaturally” reconfigures the balance and life of ecosystems, putting us in very close proximity with species that, due to human traffics, step out their evolutionary biomes and come to invade other niches, including ours. This is the subject of The Argentine Ant, a novella Calvino published in 1952. There is historical ground in this case, too. As the author writes in a letter of 1984, “The Argentine Ant is the most realistic story ever written in my life; it describes with absolute precision the situation of cultivated lands in Sanremo and in most part of the Riviera di Ponente, invaded by Argentine ants as I was a child, in the 1920s and 1930s.”16 And the arrival of this small and destructive ant, Linepithema humile, native of the Paraná region and ranking “among the 16 Letter to Goffredo Fofi, 30 January 1984, in Calvino (2000), p. 1511 (my translation). world’s 100 worst animal invaders,”17 was indeed a plague tied to the very fortune of the Riviera, where the import-export of plants was (and still is) one of the main sources of income.18 The invasion started around 1920. The detail that Calvino “mercifully omits,” Domenico Scarpa reports, is that his father (a Professor of Agriculture and a small plantation manager) might have been personally responsible for the importation of these intrusive aliens: “the ants arrived in the Riviera along with the exotic plants that Mario Calvino had brought with him as he moved back to Italy” from Cuba, where he was working and where Italo was born (Scarpa 1999, 128). This hypothesis, conveyed by Calvino’s wife Esther in private conversations and possibly believed to be true by Calvino himself, makes the story even more intriguing.19 However, Mario might be innocent: already in 1923, namely, two years prior to the return of the Calvino family to Sanremo, the city council had issued a public alarm about the ant invasion, and there are sources that date the infiltration back to 1919 (Paoli 1923; Castello). This gives the sense of how Linepithema humile was a very tangible presence in the landscape of Calvino’s youth—and of how this landscape was already showing precursory signs of the Anthropocene. The novella develops in a crescendo of anxiety from the discovery of these tiny black spots to the sense of powerlessness that their uncontainable presence inspires. All of a sudden, what seemed firm and predictable—home, first of all—is exposed in its unforeseen fragility: “Our new home, although it looked so smooth and solid on the surface, was in fact porous and honeycombed with cracks and holes” (Calvino 1971, p. 150), we read in a passage. In the same episode the protagonist says: “Here we were face to face with an enemy like fog or sand, against which force was useless” (151). Reinforced by the abuse of chemicals in agriculture and land management (of which it was both cause and effect), the insects’ incontrollable threat is the typical example that the “magic-bullet approach to getting rid of ‘pests’” results in a “feedback loop” (Morton 2016, p. 49), and bounces back with undesired upshots. All around, just like in the typical Anthropocene narratives (Bill McKibben’s Eaarth, for instance), corners of quirkiness emerge from the apparently familiar environment that reveals its eerie dark side: I was following the line of ants down the trunk, and saw that the silent and almost invisible swarm continued along the ground in every direction between the weeds. How […] shall we ever be able to get the ants out of the house when over this piece of ground, which had seemed so small yesterday but now appeared enormous […], the insects formed an uninterrupted veil, issuing from what must be thousands of underground nests and feeding on the thick sticky soil and the low vegetation? […] In certain places, where they had perhaps collected some plant juice or animal remains, there was a guarding crust of ants stuck together like the black scab of a wound. (Calvino 1971, p. 150) The insect invasion is clearly another epitome of nonhuman agency, here emphasized by the singular “the Argentine ant”: “a name came to my mind: ‘Argentine ants,’ or rather, ‘the Argentine ant,’ that’s what they called them; and now I came to think of it I must have heard someone saying that this was the country of ‘the Argentine ant’” (Calvino 1971, p. 146). The presence of “the ant” across the country is also an epitome of how the agency of bios intraacts with geology in the Anthropocene. With a super-colony spreading from Liguria to 17 See Lowe et al (2000). See also Castello (undated). 19 My gratitude to Domenico Scarpa for this otherwise inaccessible fascinating detail. 18 Portugal, Linepithema humile indeed transforms the underground of a huge portion of Mediterranean lands, as it also does in other parts of the world, from Australia to California.20 These subterranean colonies constitute an actor of what geologists call “bioturbation”: a process through which “living organisms affect the substratum in (or on) which they live” (Kristensen et al 2012, p. 285). In principle, there is nothing wrong with this: underground landscapes coevolve with their biological residents. But the point, in Linepithema’s case, is that its bio-turbulent presence has not coevolved with the local ecosystem, being rather the unwanted outcome of human intervention. Therefore, this apparently “natural” form of bioturbation is yet another expression of human’s systemic interference. Among the “telluric actors,” Serpil Oppermann observes, “the so-called anthropos […] is literally altering the foundational script itself […]. Underlying global change, anthroturbation is the worst of all human induced alterations of the fabric of the Earth” (Oppermann, forthcoming). And this, of course, happens on all scales and in all realms, from gigantic ant colonies to the subterranean maps of colossal planetary extractivism. In Marcovaldo, or The Seasons in the City, a collection of twenty stories published in 1963, all of these issues come together: industrial pollution, exasperated urbanization, transformed natures and resources, pervasive alien agencies. In a world whose emblem is the factory, “nature” is an unrecognizable and yet resilient ontological horizon that can only emerge in the forms of naturalcultural hybrids: city mushrooms, chemical fish, poisonous rabbits, mutant plants, and “stubborn” cats (the uncanny figure of naturalcultural liminality par excellence21). At the same time, however, these stories pose an important question: who is the anthropos of the Anthropocene? When used to aggregate “all humans” to assign an identical share of impact and liability, this disembodied concept, in fact, “fails to account for unequal human agency or unequal human vulnerabilities” (Adamson 2016, p. 160). A book apparently destined for children and stylistically dressed in irony and lightness, Marcovaldo makes clear that the “epoch of the human,” instead, is above all a class issue. For this reason, this narrative collection can be considered as Calvino’s most unequivocal environmental justice work. The protagonist and his family display all the features of environmental justice discourse: social marginality, misery and toil, malnourishment, poor individual health due to poor environmental conditions, labor exploitation, frustration, urban degradation… In such scenery, where the city is an “agglomerate of synthetic matter that confined Marcovaldo’s days” (Calvino 1983a, p. 98), even a children’s game like blowing soap bubbles is finally swallowed up in the horizon of the factory: From their smoke-stacks the factories had begun belching forth black smoke, as they did every morning. And the swarms of bubbles encountered the smoke-clouds and the sky was divided between currents of black smoke and currents of rainbow foam, and in the eddying wind they seemed to fight, and for a moment, only one moment, it looked as if the tops of the smoke-stacks were conquered by the bubbles, but soon there was such a mixture—between the smoke that imprisoned the rainbow foam and the globes of soap that imprisoned a veil of grains of soot— that you couldn’t understand anything. Until, at a certain point, after seeking and seeking in the sky, Marcovaldo couldn’t see the bubbles any longer, but only smoke, smoke, smoke. (Calvino 1983a, p. 96) That Calvino treats these topics using the “comic mode” does not change the fact that he is describing a tragic reality. His is an industrial reality, experienced by an “immigrant” (Calvino 2003, I, p. 1233, my translation) lost in a sooty landscape enclosing layers of 20 21 See Giraud et al (2002) and Wild (2004). See Morton (2016), p. 49. mineralized human lives, thus confirming that the “[c]arbon embedded in geological strata is our newest mode of autobiography” (Cohen 2016, 25). As he looks for the way to give his ailing children the opportunity to “breathe some good air” (Calvino 1983a, p. 40), for instance, Marcovaldo is fortuitously carried far away from its industrial neighborhood, briefly free to go back to previous “strata” of his life in the city: “Marcovaldo felt again a rush of the feeling he had had as a young man, arriving in the city, when those streets, those lights attracted him as if he expected something unknown from them. The swallows plunged headlong through the air onto the city” (42). But this flash of recollections lasts only a few moments before he is pushed back, physically and mentally, to his carbon biography: “Then he was seized by the sadness of having to go back down there, and in the clotted landscape he figured out the shadow of his neighborhood: it seemed to him a leaden wasteland, stagnant, covered by the thick scales of the roofs and the shreds of smoke flapping on the stick-like chimney-pots” (42). In addition to all that, the more he struggles against the city’s alienation from the “natural” world in this leaden Anthropocene wasteland, the more Marcovaldo becomes himself an alien in the city, increasing his marginalization. Every time he wants to live “naturally” and use natural “resources” (animals or food, “good air” for his children’s health or sand for his rheumatism) he is not only forced back into his social niche by his “superiors,” but the “natural” itself congeals in its thickness of “strange stranger,” revealing its erratic agency. And so, the mushrooms found at the bus stop and eaten by him and his poor neighbors turn out to be toxic, the fish taken by his children “where the river is more blue” (Calvino 1983a, pp. 67-70) are contaminated by a factory’s chemical dumping, and even the rabbit he kidnaps from the hospital (where the animal is used for testing viruses and harmful substances) is “poisonous” (51-59). There is no free lunch in nature, and even less in the industrial city, if you are poor. The “Nature” Marcovaldo searches for is thus both craved and feared, hunted and haunted, threatened and threatening. Breaking all pastoralist clichés, what Marcovaldo encounters is “a mischievous […], counterfeit Nature, compromised with artificial life” (Calvino 2003, I, p.1233, my translation). This “compromise” is the essence of the Anthropocene, here embodied by the city as a scenery at once typically Italian and globally unspecified: “for some aspects, it could be Milan, for other […] it could be Turin […]. This indeterminacy […] signif[ies] that this is not a city, but the city, any industrial metropolis” (Calvino 2001, vol. I, p. 1235; my translation). But if the Anthropocene is both a landscape and a discourse, Marcovaldo is not only a historical and sociological reflection on Italian and global landscapes of the economic boom; it is also a reflection on the human, on its environmental porosity and its ecology of mind, on the human-nonhuman relationship and on the hybrid forms that the human itself takes on, in epochs of change. Conclusion: Continuing Layers (and Stories) The “narrative stratigraphy” of the Anthropocene I have attempted to sketch in this essay temporarily stops around 1963, with Marcovaldo’s industrial sceneries and landscapes of environmental justice. In the years following these works, stirred by new visions and by the changes he perceived in and around his landscapes, Calvino was able to give us new sedimenting stories—stories that appear “just big enough to gather up the complexities and keep the edges open […] for surprising new and old connections,” as wished by Donna Haraway in her essay “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin” (2015, p. 160). These are the stories of universal kinship and cosmic evolution told by the Cosmicomics, and the stories of the never-ending capacity that natureculture has to reinvent itself, especially in the form of the city. In 1972 Calvino writes The Invisible Cities, a book that—for the unremitting emergence of nature from the cracks and folds of an apparent post-natural reality—could well be titled The Invisible Natures. In Italy—and beyond—the landscape of the Anthropocene is now fully formed. Internationally, the Invisible City is one of Calvino’s most beloved books, and the most quoted among the imaginary cities that Marco Polo describes to the Great Khan is undoubtedly Leonia, the city that “refashions itself every day,” getting rid of the “scales of its past” from toothpaste tubes to water boilers and thus turning itself into a huge waste-erupting crater (Calvino, 1997, pp. 102-103). While Leonia, usually employed as a cypher of consumerism and mirror of ecological crisis, might be the most characteristic of these cities, I believe that the one that teaches us more on our relationship to the planet in this epoch of precarious balances is Octavia. So Marco says, directly addressing the Readers22: If you choose to believe me, good. Now I will tell how Octavia, the spider-web city, is made. There is a precipice between two steep mountains: the city is over the void, bound to the two crests with ropes and chains and catwalks. You walk on the little wooden ties, careful not to set your foot in the open spaces […]. Below there is nothing for hundreds and hundreds of feet: a few clouds glide past; farther down you can glimpse the chasm’s bed. This is the foundation of the city: a net which serves as passage and as support. All the rest, instead of rising up, is hung below: rope ladders, hammocks, houses made like sacks, clothes hangers, terraces like gondolas, skins of water, gas jets, spits, baskets on strings, dumb-waiters, showers, trapezes and rings for children’s games, cable cars, chandeliers, pots with trailing plants. Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so long. 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